A call for recomendations and helpful some advice

[Jason Stephenson]

Paul Moore wrote:
> One of my drives decided it had had enough of this cruel world and committed 
> suicide this past Sunday, taking with it my /var partition.

Sorry to hear it. My system drive did the old belly up on my web server 
three weeks ago. (The drive was about 8 years old!)


>  o Preserving a LVM set residing on a software RAID mirror

I'm afraid that I can't help you with that. I generally keep copies of 
my config info and my data on my main workstation, which I back up 
whenever I feel like it. Generally, that's every couple of days. I only 
have a couple hundred megs of painful to replace data, so I make an ISO 
and burn to CD-RW (usually two copies).

> 
>  o Distro recommendations

Well, you can install Red Hat without all the KDE and Gnome stuff. Just 
choose Server and then choose the server packages that you want. You can 
also do a custom install and just choose the packages and package groups 
that you need. I run RH 8.0 on my web/email server, and did a custom 
install. I installed Apache, MySQL, and Exim from source rather than 
from RPMs.

> I have heard some good things about both Debian and Gentoo, and from what I 
> have heard these would be reasonable fits for what I need.  So, 
> very-opinionated reader, care to share some?

I've used Debian, Red Hat, and Slackware Linux distributions in a 
personal and professional capacity. They all have facilities to do what 
you want. I'd recommend any of them for your server. If you're really 
looking for something like apt-get, then use apt-get and Debian. (BTW, 
you can set up apt-get on Red Hat and Slackware, though I've never tried 
it.)

Keeping up with Red Hat Errata is fairly simple. If you have the disk 
space, just maintain a mirror of the updates.redhat.com site for your 
release(s). I keep one for 8.0 on my workstation, and then NFS mount the 
directory on my web server and laptop to install updated RPMs.

If you are looking for a very small package with a great deal of 
flexibility when it comes to installing software both at the initial 
install and later, then I'd suggest you look at one of the BSDs. FreeBSD 
is the big one (in terms of size and popularity), and I run it on my 
workstation. You can do a base install, install the ports and then 
install anything your heart desires from ports. Then, you'll only have 
the software you want or need on your machine. I'm afraid there isn't 
much in the way of automated update tools for FreeBSD, though there is a 
program called portupgrade (that you install from ports) that will 
upgrade your installed software, and some folks are working on a port of 
  apt-get to FreeBSD, and the other BSDs.

I generally upgrade my system and my ports from source. I keep the 
source tree on the machine in /usr/src, and the ports in /usr/ports. I 
use cvsup to get the latest source and ports (usually when there's an 
errata announcement on the mailing list), and then upgrade. I upgrade 
the system sources when there's an errata, as I mentioned, and I upgrade 
the apps about every three to four months, or when I do a wholesale 
system upgrade (such as going from release 4.5 to 4.7, which I did last 
week), or if there is a newer version of one of the apps that I use all 
the time (mozilla, emacs, abiword) that has big bug fixes or some new 
feature that I'm dying to try out. It can be time consuming to upgrade 
from source, but you can do the compiling in the background while you 
use the machine for other tasks.

If you're looking for a truly small server package, then I'd suggest you 
take a look at OpenBSD. It has one of the smallest base installs I've 
ever seen. It can be upgraded pretty much the same way as FreeBSD, 
though I generally just download the individual patches, apply them 
manually to the source tree, and then compile the updated apps by 
themselves. I use OpenBSD for my gateway/firewall, so I didn't need any 
packages beyond the base 2.7 release. (I'm sticking with 2.7 because it 
contains IPF, that was removed from later releases. I know the latest 
release has an IPF work-alike in it, but I'm comfortable with my set up, 
so why upgrade?)

One of the cool things about running the BSDs is that you don't give up 
compatibility with Linux or Linux apps. There are "emulators" in the 
ports collections for Linux compatibility that actually install some 
packages from RH 6.2 or 7.1 depending upon which version you chose to 
install. So, your BSD system can run applications compiled for Linux. 
You have to turn on Linux compatitibility when you compile your system 
sources, but you can do this painlessly by installing Linux binary 
compatibility in the main install. Once you get that and wine working, 
who needs another OS? :-)

I've used the Linux compatibility to run Java 2, Acrobat, and Opera 
(before there was a native FreeBSD release), among other applications. 
I've even compiled apps using the Linux GCC and linker and it produced 
binaries that ran perfectly well on my RH laptop.

Well, I'll stop stumping for FreeBSD and let you get back to your Linux 
discussions. I don't want to be accused of being off-topic. :-)