[H-GEN] Linux Distribution for A Dell Poweredge 840?

[Anthony Irwin]

David Jericho wrote:

> Robert Brockway wrote:
>> It is about security and managability, at least for me and others.
> 
> How exactly does removing the installed documentation improve any of the
> above? On my standard RHEL baseline images, I have approximately 700 MB
> of documentation for 200 MB of actual system. 

I don't think anyone is suggesting that you remove documentation to 
conserve disk space.

What they are saying is if there are services you don't use why 
install and run them. It takes up ram and provides another service 
that could potentially be exploited if a security vulnerability arises 
in that application.

And in the case of the op they wanted to cut down the amount of 
resources on the host machine to provide the most resources to the 
virtualized systems.

Why run extra things like cups, samba, apache, mysql, xorg and what 
ever else if it is not going to be used. Give the resources (most 
importantly ram not disk space) to the virtual machines. I believe 
that is what the op wanted to know about.


>> What makes you think Debian inspired poor admin practices?
> 
> Same reason PHP is a poor programming language. A herd of a thousand
> cats, all doing their own uncoordinated thing, and leading to several
> thousand ways of doing the same task. Providing 15 different versions of
> vi doesn't make life any better. In fact, it makes my life significantly
> worse when I'm the one that has to come in and clean up someone elses
> mess.
> 
> I just cannot have a resonable degree of surety that one Debian system
> is going to be very similar to another, even within the same
> organisation and with the same administrators. This isn't a brush that
> said "All Debian users are idiots", but rather "Debian promotes and
> environment that doesn't encourage doing it consistently, and that it
> takes someone of some calibre to ensure their work is consistent". And
> how many Debian systems have you come across over the years that have
> dozens of the same sorts of pacakges installed, and ultimately only one
> is used?
> 
> Being "easy" or "available" isn't everything it's apparently cracked up
> to to be.
> 

Are you serious. Debian caters for a lot more then a corporate 
environment that wants to lock everything down to a standard set of 
applications that they approve for usage.

There are lots of individuals that use Debian that want to be able to 
  apt-get install [their favorite app] and have it install without 
them having to go look for the applications web site and download and 
compile it themselves.

One of the great benefits of the free software world is that their is 
a lot of choice in how you can do things. This may not be appropriate 
for a corporate environment but what about everyone else who doesn't 
have what programs they should use dictated to them.

So what if I have pine, mutt, thunderbird and evolution on the same 
system. Different users want different email programs is that such a 
bad thing if different people work differently.

Kind Regards,
Anthony Irwin