Have I mentioned how much I hate Debian?
Aug 30th, 2007 by DizkoDan
So we landed a fairly big customer. Said customer is all about Debian. It went down kind of like this
Sales: “Will you guys support 40 Debian servers?”
Us: “No!”
Sales: “Okay, we’ll need those by the end of September”
So of course not only am I the guy responsible for creating all Linux deployments, I’m one of the only people in the company that know anything about it. I’ve never been a fan of Debian. I’ve tried to like it, and it just never works out. Talk all the shit you want about Red Hat based distros, but there’s a reason they rule the corporate Linux marketplace.
So anyway, now I have to figure out a way to integrate Debian into my kickstart server, or create another deployment server using their lame ass FAI. And did I mention that said deployments will be happening on blades that HP completely does not support Debian on? Should be fun trying to find modules for this shit, let alone managing these servers after the install.
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Heh… well in our area we have had just the opposite… RPM hell has bitten us so many times we won’t support Redhat/Fedora anymore and only do Debian.
I will give you one VERY handy command for people in your situational needs.
mastermachine# dpkg –get-selections | ssh slave1 ‘dpkg –set-selections; apt-get dist-upgrade’
Effectively clones machines (package wise) even if they mismatch architectures and crud like that. Quite handy.
How did I know as soon as I mentioned Debian, you’d appear
The RPM hell argument is about as valid as the Debian is out of date argument these days. I’d even agrue that newer versions of RH based distros have better package management than apt/dpkg.
I can do plenty of hackish cloning. The hardware is pretty much gonna be the same, so I could do images if I wanted to go down that road. I am more a fan of scripted deployment, because it gives much more flexibility than imaging. Be a Debian fan boy all you want, but anaconda is a superior install system over just about anything out there,
Heh… cause I’m like Darkwing duck
We do imaging bases and then use scripted installs to “specialize” the machines… although almost all of our setups now aren’t real machines anymore. We are buying uber-beefy opteron setups and running vmware on them so imaging is copying a couple vmdk files and changing the embedded MAC.
We come from a different world though… our machines are all HA frontended and run in pairs at minimum. We hardly ever reinstall a machine… they are almost all upgraded throughout their lifecycle… etc.. so…
Anyways… have fun in the Debian world… just don’t let anyone talk you into Ubuntu for servers yet… that thing is way too green.