SliceHost 3-Way-Handshake Podcast Episode 8 — over 80% of Slice at SliceHost runs on Debian-based distributions (Debian, Ubuntu), verses around 5.5% for Gentoo. RPM-based distributions (CentOS, Fedora, etc) is a bit bigger but simply does not compare with overwhelming domination of Debian-based distributions.

Over the last 3-4 months I have also gradually moved my Gentoo based servers to either Ubuntu or Debian (prefer the latest Ubuntu if available). In fact I have just deleted my 18 month old Gentoo slice at SliceHost, and moved all content to a new slice running Ubuntu 7.10 last month. Now I am happy to say that all of my live servers/VPS are now running either Ubuntu or Debian, and it has changed my Monday morning (my usual mass-update morning) from:

1. # emerge --sync
2. # emerge -avD world
3. Starring at compilation messages scrolling across the screen.
4. Trying to figure out why some packages are blocking, some packages do not emerge, and why some packages I upgraded last week is now down-grading again.
5. … 20 minutes later I finally got my root prompt back!
6. Restart all services that I have emerged, finger crossed hoping that nothing breaks, otherwise revdep-rebuild while reading special upgrading instruction on PAM, MySQL, or OpenSSL at Gentoo.org.

To:

1. # apt-get update
2. # apt-get upgrade

Upgrading all the packages in the Gentoo Portage system can be very time consuming, and it gets worse when you have quite a few servers to upgrade!

Two months ago I had written an article on tuning GCC parameters for compilation under low-memory VPS, by limiting the maximum memory it can use, which is often useful on user-bean-counter based VPS’s (OpenVZ and non-SLM Virtuozzo). It worked in most cases on my 256Mb VPS at VPSLink, but in some circumstances the packages just won’t compile.

There is an interesting forum post explaining how you can get Gentoo to emerge essential packages on VPSlink’s basic VPS with only 64Mb of memory! I originally thought it would be impossible, but by mangling GCC’s garbage collection parameters it indeed can be done.

Have you ever installed packages on Linux that just break everything because of those nasty “undefined symbol” errors? Don’t you just hate dependency hell? This is why Gentoo has always been my choice of Linux distribution. When some library comes with bug fixes, just re-emerge it, and re-build everything that depend on that library to make sure everything still runs — at exactly the version you want.

In this blog post I will be looking at cutting down the memory used by the Secure Shell daemon running on your VPS, by replacing it with a lite-version that does 90% of what OpenSSH can do — Dropbear.

I have been a Linux user since ‘95. I still remembered my very first Linux distribution — Slackware 2.x on 50+ floppy diskettes, and I still remembered the joy to have it installed on my 486 DX-4 75 with 8Mb of RAM. However I eventually got tired with Slackware, for the next ten or so years there has constantly been a search for “the perfect distribution”. I started with Debian, tried Red Hat, moved to Mandrake, and finally settled down on Gentoo Linux.