[LUNI] Ubuntu Server

[Martin Maney]

On Tue, Apr 24, 2007 at 06:37:08PM -0500, Rick Munday wrote:
> How many of you are running Ubuntu server and what are your thoughts?

I had thought I'd be using Ubuntu on servers this year, and in some
tests and one fairly large trial setup it was looking real good.  The
five year lifetime for 6.06 LTS sounded like the best of both worlds -
a solid, long-supported server platform but with frequent stable
successor releases available when I finally felt the need.

Then I got obsessed with doing server consolidation using Xen, and now
I'm running Etch and have the first guest replacement server going;
currently looking at FAI as an easier way to setup the other guests. 
The issue was simply that 6.06 had squat for Xen support, and using
upstream's stuff would have been more interesting than I want a server
to be.  (for the most part, getting Xen bugfixes let alone enhancements
means moving to whatever later kernel they happened to be working
against that month, and 2.6 kernels are much too prone to changing
important bits that disturb, even break, system userland for me to like
the prospects.  KVM will be the future, but emphasis on future,
including new hardware.)  And then about the time I was starting to set
this up "for real this time, no more trial balloons" Xen did a new drop
that broke the support in 6.10... and Etch (then prerelease) was on it
before I finished being miffed, so here I are...

But aside from this one aspect that was a showstopper for one specific
goal Ubuntu had been looking real good, and I would probably have gone
with it just for the slight gain of only having one upstream's updates
to keep up with (at least until the desktops moved on to later
releases, but still).

> I installed it today on a little Dell PowerEdge 1550 and was totally
> surprised at how well it performs on that box (2x1GHz and 1GB RAM).

Don't know why that would be surprising, unless you've been using only
[over]loaded distros.  Ubuntu and Debian are pretty lean at heart.

> Threw XFCE on it for giggles.
> 
> It seems like a really tight server.

Ubuntu or Debian; Debian or Ubuntu.  It's as much a matter of taste for
a server install unless you have a compelling issue as I did with Xen
support.  (no, I haven't looked at Feisty - it's a bit late to go back
and do it over again anyway.... for me)

-- 
Among the greater ironies of the computer age is the fact that
information is cheap and accessible, and so it is no longer very valuable.
What is valuable is what one does with it.
And human imagination cannot be mechanized. -- the New York Times