[PLUG] Fedora change...

Sean, Sharon and Kyle Harbour sharbours at yahoo.com
Wed Nov 12 15:29:02 UTC 2003


--- AthlonRob <AthlonRob at axpr.net> wrote:
> On Wed, 2003-11-12 at 13:24, Sasha Romanosky wrote:
> 
> > What is it exactly about Mandrake that makes you say its
> unstable, bulky
> > and not geared towards a server setup
> 
> Unstable - everybody I've spoken to who has used Mandrake within
> the
> last few years has noticed it has crashed a few times on them. 

<snip>

> Bulky - it's just so darned sluggish.  When last I installed it, it
> installed, by default, a *ton* of startup services.  Yes, you can
> turn
> them off, but I like the policy of stuff being off unless I turn it
> on,
> personally.  Another thing folks who move away from Mandrake I've
> run in
> to tend to rave about is the increased speed.  They can't believe
> how
> fast their systems can boot and how snappy things (even bulky, slow
> things like KDE) feel to them.
> 
> The above two pretty much rule it out for a server setup.  You
> don't
> want to waste resources on a production server - it just doesn't
> make
> sense.  Stability should be paramount, too.  Ideally, you really
> shouldn't ever have to look at a server again except to update this
> or
> that.

<snip>

> 
> Rob

As someone who runs Mandrake in a heavily stressed multi-server
environment (CPU is normally at least 50% during the workday), I
would have to respectfully disagree. Mandrake has been quite stable
for me for the last two years running 8.1, 8.2 and 9.1 in production.

Sure, I've had it crash on me, but normally only on my home systems
running a mixture of weird obsolete junk hardware and lots of
experimental software installs. The one time in recent memory I had
it crash at work was due to a flaky generic motherboard that seemed
to overheat after a while. New motherboard, no problems. On certified
Dell server hardware, it has not crashed for me.

Speed issues are questionable. It seems that you have to be very
careful making remarks like this, because of the wild variety in
distribution setups. Redhat 8 crawls on some of my machines, and 9
isn't much better, but Mandrake seems pretty snappy on the majority.
Subtle things like video driver settings make huge differences in
perceived system response. Plus, if you are going to use a hardware
optimised version of linux for a server, you had better have some
idea of what you are doing and know enough to customize your install
to disable or remove unneeded services. I agree that enabling
services by default may not be the best choice, but Mandrake offers
their 'security level' choices to mitigate that. If you choose to
install a honeypot, set the security to none, if you want to lock it
down, set the security to maximum and let the scripts fight it out.
If you don't trust the scripts, do it manually. It's all about
choice, but I am really careful about what I choose to bash on in
public. (pun intended) :^P

Sean Harbour

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail AddressGuard
http://antispam.yahoo.com/whatsnewfree




More information about the PLUG mailing list