Hello,

We have a client that uses a particular hosting service. They seem to be mostly Microsoft-based, but they list that they also support:

Red Hat Linux 7.0+, Red Hat Enterprise 2.1+, SuSe Enterprise Linux, Solaris 2.6+, HP-UX 11.0+

If they ask which OS we prefer, what do you recommend?

And yes, if the client will agree, I'll gladly move to a preferred Drupal/Linux specialist server host, but that may not be a choice.

So, if you HAD to pick from one of the above, what would it be?

Thanks,

devGuy

Comments

cog.rusty’s picture

Not sure. "Whichever they have supported before"?

devGuy’s picture

I'll ask them if they have a preference.

devGuy’s picture

Anyone else have thoughts or preferences?

Tresler’s picture

I haven't done the research on anything besides Debian, but what you want to check is if the distro you use has up to date packages for the AMP stack. 95% of the time this won't be an issue, but you need to know you'll have Apache2.2, Mysql 5.x, PHP 5.x if you don't it disqualifies that distro. (well not really, but for your purposes it kinda does).

Hope this helps. -Sam

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Sam Tresler
http://www.advomatic.com/

Tresler’s picture

Debian handles garbage collection differently than standard php. Drupal keys its sessions expirations to that, ergo, Debian requires that you have a custom php config to empty your sessions table.... which is fine if you know about it, if you don't then you can wind up with a site-debilitating sessions table that requires downtime to fix.

It can be hard to find things such as that ^^, but making sure all the software it comes prepackaged with is up to date is always a good idea.

-------------------------------------------
Sam Tresler
http://www.advomatic.com/

AfterSys’s picture

in the long run, go with debian because youll maintain it easier and mess it up less (of course, if you dont try to mess it up really hard), basically whatever you need to install, is likely a package that you can easily _update_ in the future
im running my servers with autoupdates and without a glitch to this day, this means i stay secure and wont wake up to a day when ill have a month to work on updating my network :-) .. have good backups when you are autoupdating, and easy to rollback from them, just so youre on the safe side

strayed from the subject.. well i dont tend to like redhat much because of its past and well known rpm (packet manager) bugs that made it blow in my face when updating
suse is german and theyre known for making good stuff, i would go with them but.. its still redhat under the hood

seanray’s picture

I prefer Red Hat Enterprise 2.1+ if I only can pick one from your list. But now, I am using CentOS