Posted by redndahead on September 10, 2010 at 3:46am
Hello everyone. In an attempt to try to get our operations team to switch our web server OS from Solaris I need to try to gather some information on what Operating System other Universities are using. If you could take the time to post what OS you are using and what University you are from that would be really helpful to me. Thank you in advance.
Adam Moore
University of California, Merced
Comments
Using CentOS 5.5
Recently went through this same discussion. We ended up using CentOS 5.5, a Redhat clone. On of the nice things is that it has RPMs that include all of the major applications that you will need. Which makes upgrading down the road much easier. The other great reason for us is that the IT people that run the stack were already familiar with CentOS, so it was much easier to setup and, god-forbid, troubleshoot.
I also know people that use Ubuntu and Mac OS X. I would go with what you are most comfortable using.
James Fuller
Heidelberg University
Fedora
We run Drupal sites on a server running Fedora 10 and I love its stability and ease of use. Keeping the sites up to date with Drush is a breeze. The newest release is Fedora 13: http://fedoraproject.org/
We also have several other servers running Ubuntu 10 and these are also quite stable and Drupal friendly.
The majority of our university's web servers run Windows as the server admins prefer to manage the servers through Windows GUI and we have one Drupal 6 dev site on a server running Windows Server 2003. While Drupal on Windows is more trouble than on the Linux machines, it still works well (mostly), but not as fast as Linux. Upgrades are more time consuming, and permissions are... well let's just say "Windows". Getting Clean urls working is a chore, and I've heard that Drush will work on Windows with some tweaking, but I am not there yet.
Ralph J Seward
Wheeling Jesuit University
CentOS
We also use CentOS for our webserver. The benefit of Cent for us is that we used to having an RPM based linux distro and Cent has long term support. We also run it with no X-server installed so it's all command line. The problem with Fedora is that they come out with a new release every 6 months so it gets to be hard to stay up to date.
I would stay away from using a Mac server, we used to do that and it was awful.
CentOS vs Fedora
This is from http://www.webmasterworld.com/linux/4112957.htm
"Legal ramifications prevent them from flat out saying it, but CentOS is RH Linux. Fedora is merely RH's free version, unsupported.
...
CentOS and Fedora are from the same Linux distribution family so you won't see any difference in application paths, etc. Personally I have switched all my servers from Fedora to CentOS and never had a real problem porting shell scripts applications etc.
The large difference is that Fedora tries to add drivers for all kind of new hardware and newer versions of applications as soon as they become available. The applications in CentOS are more stable and mature, but less hardware is supported. But that is generally not an issue for a server. Fedora has one problem and that is the support cycle. Once a new version comes (they are now planning release 13), the old versions are only supported for a period of some months. After that bug and security fixes are only released for the newest version. Therefore you have to upgrade every several months, just to keep your server up to date with the latest security updates. There haven't been any security fixes for your current FC6 for a long time. The support cycle lifetime of CentOS is about the same length as the hardware life cycle. The current CentOS 5 version will receive general updates until 2014 and security fixes until 2017."
Thank you guys for getting
Thank you guys for getting back to me.
CentOS
CentOS, but I use the testing repository (http://dev.centos.org/centos/5) to get php 5.2
I will switch to CentOS or RHEL 6 when it comes out.
I also have messed with Ubuntu as a server, but I am much more familiar with RedHat based systems.
Sorry for the late reply, we
Sorry for the late reply, we use Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 at San Francisco State University.
Drupal evangelist.
www.CoderintheRye.com
Apache all the way
Newest Redhat w/ php 5.3 (or whatever it's up to these days) installed. We run 5 servers in a similar setup and I know of several dozen more setup with at least redhat / apache around here.
Ex Uno Plures
http://elmsln.org/
http://btopro.com/
http://drupal.psu.edu/
As far as I know Red Hat only
As far as I know Red Hat only officially supports/provides PHP 5.1
Are you using external repositories for 5.3? I've been out on a ship for 2 months, so perhaps I missed something.
Drupal evangelist.
www.CoderintheRye.com
That is correct as far as I
That is correct as far as I know and it was one of the reasons we aren't too keen on RH/CentOS. For web development older and stabler does not always equal better. Things move too fast in this area.
yes sorry, I had that
yes sorry, I had that confusingly worded. externals for php 5.2.13 which is enough to clean up the status report page :p
Ex Uno Plures
http://elmsln.org/
http://btopro.com/
http://drupal.psu.edu/