Maintaining stability within Arch/Backup Planning

cynicalpsycho · 2014-11-01 17:22:26

Hello Forum,
I've been using Arch for around 5 months or so. I truly do love this operating system, and the amount of control it offers and to be fair, in the short time I've been using it, I've only had pain with one update, and it was still a relatively minor fix.

My issue is that I have recently assembled a new computer, and I'm debating on what to run as its primary OS. On this system I plan on having a couple of virtualized servers, which I will need to have regular access too, my worry is that Arch may have some major bug in the future after an update, and I will not be able to utilize these servers.

I have tried going back to a more stable yet extensible OS, fedora for example (Primarily because I will be administrating Redhat boxes in my next job) but I am now completely dissatisfied with an overly bloated and opaque operating system, that would require hours of streamlining to get it down to a level that feels comfortable.

I've thought of doing a dual boot with an LTS solution as a backup to ensure I can gain access to the system, but this would still be pretty resource intensive.

If you were going to be running a system that required stability. What would you do to ensure stability? What are some other possible minimal base, but highly extendable options?

Last edited by cynicalpsycho (2014-11-01 22:37:11)

graysky · 2014-11-01 17:39:03

Read the news page and the mailing lists, to answer your questions. If uptime is paramount, ie you are using these for commerce or the like, I recommend centos or Debian. If money will not be lost, I have found arch to be plenty stable and afford me all the benefits you cited above as to why keep it.

Last edited by graysky (2014-11-01 17:39:44)

progandy · 2014-11-01 17:55:14

If you are intersted in an arch-like distrubtion you might look closer at alpinelinux. They claim to provide a stable and secure minimal system which is suited for server usage. When I tested it I felt right at home, but it has been some time since then and I never did a stress test.
If you want to go with a xen hypervisor, XCP is also interesting as dom0.
Aside from these special considerations I'd go with a stable server distribution when I need reliable remote updates. When I can do the updates locally, then arch is possible, too.

Last edited by progandy (2014-11-01 18:07:26)

cynicalpsycho · 2014-11-01 18:22:28

progandy wrote:

If you are intersted in an arch-like distrubtion you might look closer at alpinelinux. They claim to provide a stable and secure minimal system which is suited for server usage. When I tested it I felt right at home, but it has been some time since then and I never did a stress test.
If you want to go with a xen hypervisor, XCP is also interesting as dom0.
Aside from these special considerations I'd go with a stable server distribution when I need reliable remote updates. When I can do the updates locally, then arch is possible, too.

Alpine seems interesting, but it also seems to be pretty under supported/documented. I'm not sure I'm ready to go on that adventure just yet. But the Xen Hypervisor does seem interesting. Why would you recommend it over say... virtualbox?

progandy · 2014-11-01 20:33:35

cynicalpsycho wrote:

Alpine seems interesting, but it also seems to be pretty under supported/documented. I'm not sure I'm ready to go on that adventure just yet. But the Xen Hypervisor does seem interesting. Why would you recommend it over say... virtualbox?

I recommend KVM or Xen if you want to run virtual servers. For the reasons, please read about Paravirtualization (Xen and KVM) vs Emulation (Virtualbox).
Edit: virtualbox also has some paravirtualization featues, Xen and KVM seem to be more efficient.

Last edited by progandy (2014-11-01 20:44:02)

jasonwryan · 2014-11-01 20:37:15

If I wanted stability, I'd run Debian.

That isn't to say that Arch isn't stable, it is; but it is also relatively high maintenance, and for a server I want the opposite.

Moviuro · 2014-11-01 20:44:20

I'm in no way an expert of Operating Systems but I would go for FreeBSD.

It has a huge flexibility (ports), a very stable base and has the jails (a chroot on steroids). On a ZFS filesystem, it's cheap to setup and get running.
Also, you have to love ZFS, while we all wait on BTRFS to catch on and become even better.
It keeps the things simple, like arch (no tools are forced on you to do anything, though, same as in arch, you should use the package manager and avoid installing directly from source).

cynicalpsycho · 2014-11-01 22:35:15

progandy wrote:

cynicalpsycho wrote:
Alpine seems interesting, but it also seems to be pretty under supported/documented. I'm not sure I'm ready to go on that adventure just yet. But the Xen Hypervisor does seem interesting. Why would you recommend it over say... virtualbox?
I recommend KVM or Xen if you want to run virtual servers. For the reasons, please read about Paravirtualization (Xen and KVM) vs Emulation (Virtualbox).
Edit: virtualbox also has some paravirtualization featues, Xen and KVM seem to be more efficient.

theinternets wrote:

Native virtualization (or full virtualization) is where a type-2 hypervisor is used to partially allow access to the hardware and partially to simulate hardware in order to allow you to load a full operating system. This is used by emulation packages like VMware Server, Workstation, Virtual PC, and Virtual Server.
Paravirtualization is where the guest operating systems run on the hypervisor, allowing for higher performance and efficiency. For more technical information and videos on this topic, visit VMware’s Technology Preview for Transparent Virtualization. Examples of paravirtualization are Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware ESX Server."

I just learned something new... Oh, and emulations is the process of simulating hardware, ie videogame emulation, vbox would be considered native virtualization. Thanks for the tip Progandy. That is interesting indeed!

cynicalpsycho · 2014-11-01 22:39:20

Moviuro wrote:

I'm in no way an expert of Operating Systems but I would go for FreeBSD.
It has a huge flexibility (ports), a very stable base and has the jails (a chroot on steroids). On a ZFS filesystem, it's cheap to setup and get running.
Also, you have to love ZFS, while we all wait on BTRFS to catch on and become even better.
It keeps the things simple, like arch (no tools are forced on you to do anything, though, same as in arch, you should use the package manager and avoid installing directly from source).

I've never used BSD, how much would you say it differs from your run of the mill linuxbox? Learning curve, etc.

Moviuro · 2014-11-01 23:17:03

cynicalpsycho wrote:

I've never used BSD, how much would you say it differs from your run of the mill linuxbox? Learning curve, etc.

Partitionning was a tricky part for me but I heard that FreeBSD 10.0 comes with an installer that can set you up with a ZFS root.
Frankly, nothing really different from the Arch philosophy before the big jump to systemd (rc.conf, service <service> <{one,}{start,stop,...}>).
All tools have different names, however (pciconf instead of lspci and the such).
I have never played with virtualization on Linux but the FreeBSD + ezjail (jail administration wrapper) + ZFS are killers.
https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/jails.html
http://erdgeist.org/arts/software/ezjail/
Also, I find the BSDs cleaner than Linuses as they clearly separate base things in / and from packages in /usr/local.
If you have a rather short on memory machine (ie < 8GB), you'll have to do some tweaking to ZFS so that it doesn't eat everything (including your house and cat).

But the only person who can truly tell is you: try installing 10.0 inside a virtual machine, you'll see how well everything goes

karol · 2014-11-01 23:24:37

Moviuro wrote:

If you have a rather short on memory machine (ie < 8GB), you'll have to do some tweaking to ZFS so that it doesn't eat everything (including your house and cat).
But the only person who can truly tell is you: try installing 10.0 inside a virtual machine, you'll see how well everything goes

A VM with a ton of RAM to try a simple OS that will host a bunch of virtualized servers?

What virtualization methods are you familiar so far? OpenVZ?

Last edited by karol (2014-11-01 23:25:59)

Moviuro · 2014-11-02 08:45:17

karol wrote:

A VM with a ton of RAM to try a simple OS that will host a bunch of virtualized servers?

I meant that you should first try to install FreeBSD in a safe environment and see how it behaves before putting it on your production server No need for it to be huge if you want to simply try it out. If you can make what you want out of the VM, you should be ready to go.

karol wrote:

What virtualization methods are you familiar so far? OpenVZ?

I'm not familiar at all with virtualization: the only things I did were some VBox and VMware on my low-end machine to try some linuses before switching to Arch. So far, I only use jails in production (and containers on CoreOS should follow).

Arch Linux

#1 2014-11-01 17:22:26

Maintaining stability within Arch/Backup Planning

#2 2014-11-01 17:39:03

Re: Maintaining stability within Arch/Backup Planning

#3 2014-11-01 17:55:14

Re: Maintaining stability within Arch/Backup Planning

#4 2014-11-01 18:22:28

Re: Maintaining stability within Arch/Backup Planning

#5 2014-11-01 20:33:35

Re: Maintaining stability within Arch/Backup Planning

#6 2014-11-01 20:37:15

Re: Maintaining stability within Arch/Backup Planning

#7 2014-11-01 20:44:20

Re: Maintaining stability within Arch/Backup Planning

#8 2014-11-01 22:35:15

Re: Maintaining stability within Arch/Backup Planning

#9 2014-11-01 22:39:20

Re: Maintaining stability within Arch/Backup Planning

#10 2014-11-01 23:17:03

Re: Maintaining stability within Arch/Backup Planning

#11 2014-11-01 23:24:37

Re: Maintaining stability within Arch/Backup Planning

#12 2014-11-02 08:45:17

Re: Maintaining stability within Arch/Backup Planning

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