Arch Linux as a Production Server?

oran001 · 2006-08-12 17:06:03

Is it possible? Does archlinux secure enough? Does she have all the tools needed for such comparing to distros like RH/Centos?

scarecrow · 2006-08-12 21:20:56

I wouldn't use Arch, or any rolling/bleeding edge distro, on a production server.
But certainly enough it's feasible and doable, if you're brave enough.

oran001 · 2006-08-13 22:41:44

Thank you. That's what I thought.

kth5 · 2006-08-14 12:02:36

scarecrow wrote:

I wouldn't use Arch, or any rolling/bleeding edge distro, on a production server.
But certainly enough it's feasible and doable, if you're brave enough.

i am brave enough and am actually happier than with debian or suse before. regular updates are a blessing. things doen't get backported but instead the software is upgraded, which presents some trouble at times (like apache 2.0.x => 2.2.x) but hey. better than being tied to mess with security on old software or really having a unstable system.

if you don't have the time or a clue, go with debian testing. updating can be a pain here though as you never now what influences what, where and how. debconf is uber-complex.

suse doesn't update at all after a while, so i definetly wouldn't chose them for a production server. although this might change with opensuse, which i don't like cos i am forced to use yast...

rhfrommn · 2006-08-14 18:13:46

I consider arch unacceptable for a production server for one very important reason - lack of support contracts. Every company I've ever worked for requires you to purchase a support contract for your production servers. When there are problems you need an 800 number to call to get an engineer on it right away. With arch that is just impossible since arch doesn't sell them.

If you work at a place where they allow production servers to NOT be covered then this may not apply. But I wouldn't ever consider such a machine to truly be "production".

kth5 · 2006-08-15 09:25:56

rhfrommn wrote:

I consider arch unacceptable for a production server for one very important reason - lack of support contracts. Every company I've ever worked for requires you to purchase a support contract for your production servers. When there are problems you need an 800 number to call to get an engineer on it right away. With arch that is just impossible since arch doesn't sell them.
If you work at a place where they allow production servers to NOT be covered then this may not apply. But I wouldn't ever consider such a machine to truly be "production".

so you say: never trust your house admin and his bonds to the community?
that's pretty old fashioned...

at my company we would never run redhat and suse for exactly this reason: support contracts. sure, you can have a trainee administrating it easily, for that you need a support contract yes. but for as long as you have a capable admin, you should trust him more than some redhadish company that hasn't really got to do anything with your business.

and most admins - unless not interested in their job - will prefer free alternatives with contineous updates over more than a minor release.

mucknert · 2006-08-15 12:42:17

What sprang to my mind was: what's the worth of an admin that needs to rely on a support-contract anyway? The answer to that question would be, in my very own and humble opinion: damn, what a lousy admin that isn't able to solve problems on its own. But yes... 's just me speaking.

ralvez · 2006-08-15 14:32:26

Support contracts have little to do with Admins and all to do with CIOs.
See, corporations will "hide" behind support contracts so if something goes wrong and affects the share holders bottom line (say downtime costs the company BIG $$$), there is someone to blame other than CIOs.

That is also the main reason the adoption of Linux in corporate environments has been slow and mostly on the back end such as file and web servers.
This also explain why it is so important to have companies like IBM and Novell and others to provide support for Linux in the corporate world.

Hope this helps.

rhfrommn · 2006-08-15 15:55:09

kth5 and mucknert: Your point about the quality of the admin is mostly wrong. In a tiny mom and pop business with only a few machines a skilled admin may be able to get by without a support contract. But in a corporate environment where your IT infrastructure must be up at all times or your business loses money that isn't possible.

I know a couple admins who mentored me early in my career. They've been doing Unix admin for 12+ years each. They can command bill rates over $150 per hour and never are out of a job because companies fight over who gets to hire them. When I've been on job interviews and the interviewer sees my references sheet almost every IT person in my city knows them and considers them the best in the field.

And they would never use a server in a production environment without a support contract.

A support contract isn't there to hold your hand and help you do your job. It is there for when things are broken that you can't possibly fix on your own. And I don't want to hear any B.S. like "I have the source, I can fix anything!". If your server is really production whether you could eventually fix it on your own doesn't matter. You don't have time to do that since every hour of downtime is costing your boss more than you make in a month. If not, that isn't a real production server. You need to get on the phone with the vendor NOW and have a fix as soon as possible - not post to some mailing list and wait for help.

Also consider, nobody in the "community" is responsible for fixing your problem. They may offer help, but it is on a volunteer basis and you have no guarantees as to the quality or speed of response for whatever help you get. But if you buy support contracts the seller of it is responsible. If they don't live up to their support agreements it costs them huge money. I've seen a case where a storage vendor's tech make a mistake that cost my company a few extra hours of downtime on a critical application. To make up for it they gave us $40,000 worth of free hardware so we wouldn't get pissed and take our business elsewhere. This is a very good incentive for them to not make such mistakes in the future. If some dude on a mailing list says "try this" and it wecks your machine what recourse do you have?

Final point - I'll buy your comment about "good admins don't need a support contract" if you agree that "good admins never need to post a question asking for help". Nobody knows everything - the only difference we're talking about is where you get your help from. When it comes to a production server, it only makes sense to get it from a support contract where there are service level guarantees and penalties for the vendor if they don't fix your problem in a timely manner. If you don't need that, your server wasn't production in the first place.

mucknert · 2006-08-15 17:18:48

Points considered and well taken. I believe not many people can share that kind of experience; so thank you for the clarification. I appreciate it.

rhfrommn · 2006-08-15 17:48:40

Thanks for the polite reply mucknert.

After re-reading the thread and my post I have a comment about what I said before. Several times I referred to what could be considered a production server and what wouldn't. Well, maybe part of the disagreement over whether Arch works in production is because of that definition.

Just to clarify where I was coming from, most places I've worked a server was considered production depending on one of two criteria:
1. The company would directly lose revenue from it being down (example: a company that provided online expense report management apps for fortune 500 companies). Or,
2. A major fraction of the business would be idled by the server being down (a medical company with engineering and manufacturing systems that would leave whole departments unable to work if they went down).
Less important servers would be considered infrastructure support , dev, test, or QA systems and not production.

I'm sure you can see how if that is what you call production you need a support contract for all production boxes and software. But I should have been a little more flexible in my thinking that maybe there are companies that consider things like email or print servers, web proxies, internal app servers, etc. production. In a case like that you'd have to weigh the cost of the contract vs. the loss of productivity you'd have without it and see if it makes sense for you.

afu · 2006-08-15 18:21:36

The first time your "most excellent" admin dosen't show up for work and your system needs emergency attention will be a clear clue what service contracts are for.

The latter side is that you might be lucky to get someone on the phone that knows how to do something other than reboot the system.

-Shawn

mucknert · 2006-08-15 19:46:57

rhfrommn wrote:

Thanks for the polite reply mucknert.
After re-reading the thread and my post I have a comment about what I said before. Several times I referred to what could be considered a production server and what wouldn't. Well, maybe part of the disagreement over whether Arch works in production is because of that definition.
Just to clarify where I was coming from, most places I've worked a server was considered production depending on one of two criteria:
1. The company would directly lose revenue from it being down (example: a company that provided online expense report management apps for fortune 500 companies). Or,
2. A major fraction of the business would be idled by the server being down (a medical company with engineering and manufacturing systems that would leave whole departments unable to work if they went down).
Less important servers would be considered infrastructure support , dev, test, or QA systems and not production.
I'm sure you can see how if that is what you call production you need a support contract for all production boxes and software. But I should have been a little more flexible in my thinking that maybe there are companies that consider things like email or print servers, web proxies, internal app servers, etc. production. In a case like that you'd have to weigh the cost of the contract vs. the loss of productivity you'd have without it and see if it makes sense for you.

Again, the clarification is much appreciated. Production Machines are those intended to "just work" and be reliable. In the best case, those should need as little administering (or tinkering) as possible--or that's how I understood your post. Uptime is crucial for revenue in those cases. But, as you already said, people define "production" differently at times. I, for myself, would call a mailserver a "production" machine, too, for the sole fact that it does something productive. And for that, a support contract might be overkill and Arch might just work for that. Given your understanding of "production" I'd share your opinion of "Stay the hell away from Arch!". One of the inherent characteristics of Arch is that it *needs* tinkering at times--something that no-one likes when it comes to cost-efficiency and uptime.

To sum it up: Arch might not be the right Choice for the Amazon Main-DB Server but not because it sucks (it just does not suck) but because a lot of money is at stake that nobody wants to risk.

STiAT · 2006-08-16 08:48:05

I agree with most people posting here.

Arch is great as a personal desktop / server (use it at home on 4 machines, 2 desktops, notebook, file & print server and http/ftp server).

But on a real production server, which is important for the daily business of a company i wouldn't use arch. I wouldn't even use any distribution without lts, nor any which doesn't even provide a commertial support or is a bleeding edge distribution.

I'd rather look towards RedHat, SuSE, Debian or Ubuntu (server with new lts since the latest release).

Don't get me wrong, i love the distribution, but definitely not for production servers.

//STi

Gullible Jones · 2006-08-16 15:11:35

Theoretically, it would be fine. Practically, there aren't enough people working on Arch development to guarantee the degree of non-bugginess you want.

Kern · 2006-08-16 22:36:27

i think its right, you are buying someone to shout at when things go wrong.

not too long ago a major government department here (uk) was completely screwed up by a non admin updating her XP system. it brought most of the <govt> department down across the country. Aircraft full of MS personnel were brought in. Thousands of ppl were not able to cash benefit payments.

imagine your the main IT admin in the govt dept and you chose "uncontracted O.S" ....
Arch forum: ahem can anyone help we have 100,000 pc's down. quickly please ....

much as im an advocate of Arch and am running my own business on it quite successfully, i'd hate to be responsible for more than my own handful of PC's.

That said, a friend running his own IT co, uses MS, reported that the paid phoneline help is sucky. i guess whatever OS, you need big bucks to draw any serious help.

rhfrommn · 2006-08-17 15:15:43

Kern wrote:

That said, a friend running his own IT co, uses MS, reported that the paid phoneline help is sucky. i guess whatever OS, you need big bucks to draw any serious help.

I have experienced that. I've worked in places with the whole range of support from Sun. At the bronze level you can make calls for phone support and get parts shipped to you to replace them yourself. That's about it.

On the other hand, if you buy platinum support you get 2 hour onsite response time, direct transfers to the highest level of phone support engineers instead of wading up through the tiers, and even a monthly meeting with a senior field engineer where they review your service tickets and upcoming Sun releases and pacthes. The place that had platinum support the local Sun guys even gave me their cell phone numbers so I could call them directly - nowhere else would they do that. One time I even had a Sun engineer show up in the middle of the night with over a quarter million dollars worth of parts he just picked up from the airport parts depot because our E10K was having problems and he wasn't sure which part he needed. He checked them all out and would have to do the paperwork to return all the ones he didn't use later. But he did it anyway to make sure a 2nd onsite visit wasn't needed.

Truly a matter of you get what you pay for.

Romashka · 2006-08-18 08:01:57

Arch is as good for servers as Slackware, Gentoo or Debian. The most importan factor here is admin's head.

afu · 2006-08-18 14:41:40

And if the admin's head is not available, what are the non-technical people going to do when the system does not work?

Romashka · 2006-08-21 08:09:57

afu wrote:

And if the admin's head is not available, what are the non-technical people going to do when the system does not work?

If system does not work then:
1) system is configured badly
2) admin did something wrong
3) some non-technician got his/her hands to server
4) hardware or power supply are bad

When system does not work and admin is not accesible calling by phone to tech support etc. will give almost nothing. It will be better to call admin from neighbour company to come and fix it.

I doubt that non-technical people can do much more with non-working server with Debian than with Arch.

That's my humble opinion.

BTW, from the beginning of this month I was on vacations for almost 2 weeks and when I came back to work I saw my server in exactly the same working state as I left it.
Note that I even allow users to surf Internet from this server, print to 2 printers, listen to music and download video (Xfce + OpenOffice + Firefox + Gaim etc.) - and they never did any harm to this server.
I switched this server from Debian to Arch last year and must say I was never dissapointed.

afu · 2006-08-21 15:18:55

You are assuming that all software is perfect. I have had several issues this summer with bugs in the software that required intervention. These were upstream bugs in the latest versions of source code that were causing random crashes - one was a program crash - the other would take the whole system down. These have since been fixed and our sytems updated.

I have had one server run from power outage to power outage without reboot - 630+ days uptime. Our servers are only rebooted when kernels are updated by the OS vendor (usually around 50-60 days uptime), unless there are hardware/software issues.

Running X on a production server - not on my servers
-Shawn

kth5 · 2006-08-21 15:37:21

I would never ever run an upgrade in the machine itself anyway. If you really are into production you don't have just one machine sitting there, it's at least two. One you can fallback to or if you want it fancy, round-robin or whatever.

Anyway, I have all hosts mirrored offline on backups. A machine that is exactly the same as our servers in life mode. So I do testing before upgrading of course. That said, I don't think if you do it this way - which in my opinion everyone should, who bitches so bad about the productionness - Arch isn't any worse than others. Would I just go and upgrade a Debian or RedHat box? Of course not, am I stupid?

cactus · 2006-08-21 15:41:55

kth5 · 2006-08-21 15:54:29

cactus wrote:

ouch... *runs*

afu · 2006-08-21 16:02:08

KTH5
Just curious - how long do you test before moving update into production?

I do something similar here.
-Shawn

Arch Linux

#1 2006-08-12 17:06:03

Arch Linux as a Production Server?

#2 2006-08-12 21:20:56

Re: Arch Linux as a Production Server?

#3 2006-08-13 22:41:44

Re: Arch Linux as a Production Server?

#4 2006-08-14 12:02:36

Re: Arch Linux as a Production Server?

#5 2006-08-14 18:13:46

Re: Arch Linux as a Production Server?

#6 2006-08-15 09:25:56

Re: Arch Linux as a Production Server?

#7 2006-08-15 12:42:17

Re: Arch Linux as a Production Server?

#8 2006-08-15 14:32:26

Re: Arch Linux as a Production Server?

#9 2006-08-15 15:55:09

Re: Arch Linux as a Production Server?

#10 2006-08-15 17:18:48

Re: Arch Linux as a Production Server?

#11 2006-08-15 17:48:40

Re: Arch Linux as a Production Server?

#12 2006-08-15 18:21:36

Re: Arch Linux as a Production Server?

#13 2006-08-15 19:46:57

Re: Arch Linux as a Production Server?

#14 2006-08-16 08:48:05

Re: Arch Linux as a Production Server?

#15 2006-08-16 15:11:35

Re: Arch Linux as a Production Server?

#16 2006-08-16 22:36:27

Re: Arch Linux as a Production Server?

#17 2006-08-17 15:15:43

Re: Arch Linux as a Production Server?

#18 2006-08-18 08:01:57

Re: Arch Linux as a Production Server?

#19 2006-08-18 14:41:40

Re: Arch Linux as a Production Server?

#20 2006-08-21 08:09:57

Re: Arch Linux as a Production Server?

#21 2006-08-21 15:18:55

Re: Arch Linux as a Production Server?

#22 2006-08-21 15:37:21

Re: Arch Linux as a Production Server?

#23 2006-08-21 15:41:55

Re: Arch Linux as a Production Server?

#24 2006-08-21 15:54:29

Re: Arch Linux as a Production Server?

#25 2006-08-21 16:02:08

Re: Arch Linux as a Production Server?

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