Which OS?

[Raylund Lai]

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Ubuntu is another variation of Debian with more up-to-date packages.

Suggest a link for you to look at is http://distrowatch.com/

Also try to look at FreeBSD if you're not going to install other special
packages. Anyany, FreeBSD gets a lot of ports.

Cheers
Raylund

----- Original Message -----
From: "Stephen Swaney" <steve.swaney at FSL.COM>
To: <MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK>
Sent: Monday, February 07, 2005 8:34 PM
Subject: Re: Which OS?


>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: MailScanner mailing list [mailto:MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK] On
>> Behalf Of Lance Haig
>> Sent: Monday, February 07, 2005 7:52 PM
>> To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
>> Subject: Which OS?
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I am moving my server to a hosted service. They offer many different
>> distributions on the server.
>>
>> As all you guys have much more experience with MS than I do I was
>> wondering if you would offer some advice.
>> Of this list which would be the easiest to maintain and run?
>>
> Lance,
>
> You caught me at the end o a long day and in a philosophical mood so here
> goes.
>
> What's the easiest to run and support depends on what OS you're most
> comfortable with. Solaris people should run MS on Solaris; Folks who are
> comfortable with Linux should use Linux and my friend who runs MailScanner
> on a Alpha cluster is laughing at all of us.
>
> You didn't say what level of service want to provide; home, experimental,
> commercial service, etc. That does make a difference. If it's a home
> system
> that you want to use to learn bleeding edge stuff and don't mind
> rebuilding
> every six months, the latest Fedora might be appropriate.
>
> Hopefully I won't start a religious war with the following comments. It's
> certainly not my intent and it's wonderful to have all these choices - not
> just MS and MS-lite ;)
>
>
>> CentOS 3.1 (RHEL)
>
> Actually it's 3.4 now. 3.4 came out very, very shortly after the
> equivalent
> Red Hat 3.4 release. This is my personal pick among the RH clones. I use
> it
> on production systems and have never had a glitch. I feel the yum updater
> has been more reliable than RH up2date. This would be my choice for
> productions systems where Red Hat is unaffordable and RH support is not
> essential.
>
> One Caveat, Whitebox Linux has better support for older and slower
> hardware.
>
>> Debian 3.0r1
> Debian has a deserved reputation for being a steady and dependable OS.
> I've
> used it for systems that you just want to turn on and forget (can you
> spell
> router). Only drawback for MailScanner Gateways is that it takes a while
> for
> the latest complimentary applications to filter down. For example
> SpamAssassin 3.0x was just recently released for Debian testing. This is
> not
> necessarily bad where stability is important.
>
>> Fedora Core 2
> I think its Fedora 3 now and I don't think that Fedora 2 and 1 are
> supported
> any more. This should tell you that you don't want to run this OS on high
> availability systems (and Red Hat will tell you the same thing)
>
>> Fedore Core 1
> See above
>
>> Gentoo Linux 2004.2 (09-14)
> No experience
>
>> Mandrake 9.1
> No experience
>
>> Red Hat 8.0
> End of life - stay away
>
>> Red Hat 9.0
> End of life - stay away
>
>> Slackware 9.0
> No experience
>
>> Ubuntu 4.10
> What ??? - I've got to look this one up :)
>
> You left out Red Hat ES and AS 3.x;
> If you can afford it and want or need the support, this is a very good
> choice and one you will never be fired for making.
>
> You left out SuSE Enterprise Linux 9.0;
> Also if you can afford it and want or need the support, this is a very
> good
> choice and one you will never be fired for making. It's my personal choice
> among the commercial versions of Linux. It's well packaged and yast2
> updates
> are the best; but maybe that's because I still like Novell.
>
>>
>> Thanks
>>
>> Lance
>
> I just know this will garner a few comments.
>
> Regards,
>
> Steve
>
> Steve Swaney
> President
> Fortress Systems Ltd.
> Phone: 202 338-1670
> Cell: 202 352-3262
> www.fsl.com
> steve.swaney at fsl.com
>
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