Debian most popular Webserver distro again

[inittux]

 

I came across an interesting article showing the statistics about what distro is the most popular as a webserver. It was CentOS

but just recently Debian took that position back. With Ubuntu in 3rd place but not even close to be being 2nd. I wonder why

Debian has become more popular then CentOS as a webserver and why webmast favorite distros change so quickly. Interesting

to see how there are a variety of linux distros all used as webservers even though I expected before I came across this that most

webservers would be CentOS/RHEL. Interesting how wrong our perception of things can be sometimes. I'm still running SL as

a webserver, and have never used Debian as a webserver before. Does make me curious and thinking of maybe trying debian as

a webserver just to feel and see the differences. What does your webserver run on?

[Dungeon-Dave]

Fedora 4/5 (home), CentOS5.5 (remote server), ubuntu (testbox), Debian (box I help maintain) amongst others. I've even run Apache under Windows several times (to demonstrate webserver configuration).

 

Apache is pretty similar across all of them, although I don't like the Debian-based method of "sites-available" and "sites-enabled" symlinks - just needs a bit more faffing about.

[inittux]

Fedora 4/5 (home), CentOS5.5 (remote server), ubuntu (testbox), Debian (box I help maintain) amongst others. I've even run Apache under Windows several times (to demonstrate webserver configuration).

 

Apache is pretty similar across all of them, although I don't like the Debian-based method of "sites-available" and "sites-enabled" symlinks - just needs a bit more faffing about.

 

I was just discussing with Hybrid and he said something similar about small differences in configuration files. And knowing what you mentioned now that seems kind of akward and a long way round.

Made me decide to stick with SL for my server.

[anyweb]

this webserver is running Centos and will stay that way for as long as I can forsee, I like working with RPM based distributions, always have :)

[inittux]

this webserver is running Centos and will stay that way for as long as I can forsee, I like working with RPM based distributions, always have :)

 

I like Centos/SL too. I was just wondering after reading that article about why debian seems to be more popular as a webserver. After hearing some of the differences I've decided to stick with rpm distro just because I'm starting to get used to it. And I don't find it very usefull having a configuration file split into two files. And when I compare yum to apt-get I seem to get along with yum better. Although Debian may

run just as well I just rather work with rpm.

[Dungeon-Dave]

<blockquote data-ipsquote="" class="ipsQuote" data-ipsquote-contentcommentid="15759" data-ipsquote-username="Dungeon-Dave" data-cite="Dungeon-Dave" data-ipsquote-timestamp="1326194151" data-ipsquote-contentapp="forums" data-ipsquote-contenttype="forums" data-ipsquote-contentid="4246" data-ipsquote-contentclass="forums_Topic"><div>
Fedora 4/5 (home), CentOS5.5 (remote server), ubuntu (testbox), Debian (box I help maintain) amongst others. I've even run Apache under Windows several times (to demonstrate webserver configuration).

 

Apache is pretty similar across all of them, although I don't like the Debian-based method of "sites-available" and "sites-enabled" symlinks - just needs a bit more faffing about.

 

I was just discussing with Hybrid and he said something similar about small differences in configuration files. And knowing what you mentioned now that seems kind of akward and a long way round.

Made me decide to stick with SL for my server.



</div></blockquote>
I think it's a familiarity thing - I started out Linux life on RedHat5.2, 6, etc and was used to RPM (and dependency hell). I maintained a root server running Mandrake for years and liked "urpmi" on that, then experimented with "yum" on Fedora. I've also tussled with SuSE and CentOS and felt comfortable with their RPM-based approach. Minor differences between SuSE and Fedora caught me out, but I'll have to admit SuSE did many things better than Fedora and it wasn't surprising to see Fedora incorporate some of SuSE's customisations.

 

I've only messed around with Ubuntu the last year or two as a desktop, and feel comfortable enough with dpkg/apt that I can manage (and currently am managing) a Debian system but will also look at using mint on my new tower. I notice that XBMC is based upon a Debian distro and my ubuntu knowledge helped me troubleshoot that immensely.

 

But yup - things like Debian's approach to Apache is somewhat weird, although I can understand their framework. However, their approach to pure-ftpd is completely annoying and if I hadn't had it running on CentOS/Fedora boxes, I'd have struggled badly under Ubuntu.

 

The more distros you're exposed to, the more you begin to cherry-pick good features from one and use them in another (I now have .bash_aliases files in my home dirs on most machines). In the same way, learning perl and Java has improved my approach to coding Javascript, PHP and bash scripts. I think greater exposure certainly broadens the mind!

 

By the way.. did you know you can "yum install apt" under an RPM-based system? And also install "apt-get install yum" under ubuntu/debian? well freaky!