Thoughts on moving from Debian to Ubuntu Server
We’re in the process of upgrading a Linux server for a clients, which means shiny new hardware and a complete re-install of the operating system and applications. We’ve always used Debian for servers but for various reasons this time we’re going to try Ubuntu server
One of those reasons is that Debian takes years to issue a new version. Much of that delay is because of the heavy testing and thought that makes Debian so solid, but much of it is also internal politics. Regardless of the reasons, right now a pure Debian system will be running versions of critical software that are many years out of date.
Ubuntu is currently the darling of Linux distributions for desktop use. Many of the rough edges Windows desktop users complain about with Linux have been sanded down making it more attractive and easier to install. It’s also received criticism for taking the Debian project’s hard work without contributing back sufficiently or in the right way. We tend to be pragmatists and don’t care much about fads and politics: we just see a distribution built on top of one that after nine years of our own commercial production use has proven to be solid, with the added major benefit that it stays current.
In the past, we haven’t waited for Debian releases and installed our own individual updates compiled from source. On the Debian server we’re currently upgrading, every single one of the mission critical bits have been compiled from source: the kernel, Apache, PHP, Perl, mod_security, OpenSSH, OpenSSL, some of the libraries and so on. That strategy allowed us to optimize each component, plus enhance security by doing things like building the kernel with no loadable module support and applying the GRSecurity patch. We tried to do this properly… by either building our own .deb packages or installing dummy packages so that the package manager didn’t get confused.
With this approach the problem is that when a new Debian release finally does come out, the server is too extensively customized for the famous Debian automatic upgrade capability to work. The server must be re-installed from scratch. A more serious issue is that updating all that custom-compiled stuff can pretty much be done only by us. Fostering that kind of client dependency is exactly what many consulting companies dream of accomplishing, but we don’t play that game with our clients. Installing custom packages also means we have to closely watch related security advisories and rush to compile updates when vulnerabilities are published, costing us time and effort and potentially not getting an update installed in time.
With Ubuntu we hope to be able to stick completely to vendor-packaged software. Ubuntu is entirely based on Debian so we hope to retain the advantages of Debian’s quality and the unbeatable "apt" package manager. The real kicker for us is that Canonical (the vendor) has committed to issuing updated releases every six months and to support old releases for five years. It remains to be seen if they keep those promises, but if they do we may never have to replace an obsolete vendor package with a custom compilation again.
We’ve already replaced one of our internal Debian servers with Ubuntu and the process went very well. Not surprisingly, Ubuntu Server has only a few minor differences from pure Debian. The most notable limitation has been that the set of officially supported software is much smaller than Debian., To stick to fully supported software we have to, for example, use Apache 2 and PHP 5 instead of Apache 1.3 and PHP 4. Other versions are available in Ubuntu’s "universe" repository, but they are not officially supported, guaranteed to be updated and may not allow an automated version upgrade to work.
So far the server has had perfect reliability and bug fixes are released as swiftly as with Debian. If Canonical keeps it’s update schedule and support commitments along with the legendary Debian robustness we may have a keeper.
Related posts:
- Installing Apache mod_evasive in Ubuntu Server
- Upgrading to Ubuntu Server 6.10 (edgy)
- Ubuntu Server 6.10 released
2 Responses to “Thoughts on moving from Debian to Ubuntu Server”:
September 2nd, 2006 at 11:14 pm
Good points. I’m giving both ubuntu desktop and server versions a whirl as well. Looks good so far- except for some minor bugs- most of which seem to be take of by the ubuntuforums.
January 29th, 2009 at 10:31 am
[...] a keeper.” Staff at Advosys Consulting are considering Ubuntu for entirely practical reasons.www.advosys.ca This entry was written by edafe, posted on 27/09/2006, filed under articles, computing and tagged [...]