Personally I find people harping on about running Debian on "production servers" fairly laughable.  Nothing about old code makes it better to run on "production servers" than newer code.  The only thing one could perhaps point out is that older code has been running longer and hopefully is better tested and has less bugs.  But this isn't actually always true.

If you have a server that you want to setup and forget about, then yes you want a stable (as in non-changing) platform to run it on.  Now this could be any distribution you like just as long as for the lifetime of the server's usefulness you have a source for bug & security fixes.  No code is perfect, there will always be flaws and what you want is for those flaws to be identified and fixed over this lifetime.  This support can come from a company, the community or in house developers.  Obviously in-house security support is more expensive in time/money. 

The reason RH has done away with it's stock RedHat Linux product and gone for the Enterprise line is because of this cost.  If you have lots of releases often it gets more and more difficult to support them for long periods.  So now they have ~1.5 yearly releases of RHEL and support them for 5 years and this support costs you a couple hundred USD a year.  Money companies should be happy to pay in lieu of paying people in house to provide that security/bug support.

I guess you could treat Debian stable like RHEL.  It's slow moving and provides a static system spec on which to build an app or service.  But just don't expect it to be wizz bang and modern.  If you server needs modern features and you want long term package support then you're pretty much stuck with RHEL 3 until a new version of Debian stable appears.

Another way of lowering the cost of security updates et al and yet retain modern features is to get a modern distro like Fedora Core and cut it down to the absolute minimum packages necessary to run you app or service.  And then harden the network and OS like crazy.  The less there is running on a box the less there is to go wrong.  If you want a mail server then just make it run mail and nothing else.  This makes it less expensive to track a moving target like FC. 

Regards

On Sun, 2004-04-04 at 16:54, Jason Le Vaillant wrote: 
Greig McGill wrote:

>Well, I assumed it went without saying that no one would run a production
>server on anything other than stable...
>  
>
Well, that is puzzling, because people are talking about upgrading to 
the latest Fedora, in preference to Debian. But I understand Fedora uses 
the latest versions of apps? This would seem to make it equivalent to 
Debian unstable (and just as unsuitable for production servers). I've 
never actually run Fedora though (and I haven't run Redhat for years), 
so perhaps there's some flexibility I don't know about.

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