One of my tasks this week was to setup a web server for some sites currently hosted on the tragedy of the grid. I don’t want to talk about the (mt) grid since I’ve said so much about it before but to answer “why?” I’m still on the grid for production sites is, I’ve been too busy to migrate them and at one point I was going to put them on a spry VPS but my DB was too large for their contrants, very weird indeed and I could made it work but I pushed it aside.
This week I couldn’t wait any longer I was getting so many CS calls about it “being down” or “Sooo Slow” that it became a big priority. I was planning to install Ubuntu server and setup the system in a few hours but I had so many issues with Ubuntu Server. I rather not go into details because I can’t remember them all but one major problem was webmin and gnome. I hate to rely on a UI to manage a server but it makes my tasks so much easier. Gnome installed fine after an apt-get command but there are so many dependencies that it took hours for it to download and install. At that point I was already frustrated with the install that the problems with webmin, configuration and installing some other server packages I had givin up and started the fedora core 6 downloads.
Today I had the time to finish the system but the installation was as easy as Ubuntu except for the 5 CDs it took to install everything. That was the only
downside for fedora over Ubuntu. But at least it’s a complete web server after install. Without phpMyadmin and webmin installed I was able to serve up whatever I needed with just a few service starts. The management tool provided as well are perfectly suited and easy to use. I can’t remember the particulars but it seemed Ubuntu wanted me to configure way to much after install without any management tools, fedora can serve a test page from apache after install and if not the tools provided make it a few clicks away.
After a few yum installs and eventually remembering to edit my host file in order to get webmin to show (from the host machine) I had a production server ready.
fedora has some great advatages over Ubuntu IMO: First SELinux (security) and server management tools. Another feature over Ubuntu right now would be the Xen support and management tools built into core 6. The Xen management will definitely help me get a couple webservers (maybe one for myself) installed with the little time I already have instead of wasting time figuring out how to install and configure it for Ubuntu.
This post is not saying fedora is a better web server then Ubuntu but for ease of use it’s clearly better out of the box.