-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
Marcin Cieslak:
I think that for stability it is useful to have more homogenious environment (pretty similar setup on multiple machines) so that, for example, moving a project from 'unstable' to 'stable' is easy.
yes; the only reason we don't is that most of our users only have experience with Linux, and find the Solaris userland unfamiliar (this was evident when we only had one server, which ran Solaris). we thought that using Linux on the login servers, while adding complexity for us, would reduce the amount of user support we had to do.
unfortunately the original plan - which was that i would continue to maintain the Solaris side of the infrastructure and someone else would be responsible for the user servers running Linux - did not work out very well, and a lot of my time is taken up fixing problems on the Linux side.
so, we're currently testing FreeBSD on vandale to see how it compares to Linux; if we did decide to move, all the Linux servers would be changed to FreeBSD, leaving only two operating systems, like we have at the moment. if we don't move, we won't be left with three operating system, we'll simply stop testing on vandale.
the exception, which Daniel is referring to, is that during the migration, we would install one server (willow) with the new OS, and encourage people to use that, while retaining the existing Linux server for a while. this allows us to do more real world testing (not many people are actually using the test server), and also gives people time to migrate to the new OS. after that's complete, we would reinstall the Linux systems with the new OS.
other than FreeBSD, we're also considering standardising on Solaris for user servers, which would leave us with a single OS. we might also decide not to change anything. but none of this has been decided yet, more testing is needed before we can make a firm decision.
- river