Re: Linux environment (was: Re^16: Recalcitrant placeholders)

Here are some thoughts on your choice of O/S:

Gentoo: Optimised but low-level so you will need to know what you are doing. Rolling release. Probably not ideal for your situation unless you can get someone experienced to be sysadm (in which case this would be a great choice).
FreeBSD: Solid.
CentOS 7: Old, well supported, but systemd. Goes EoL in 2024. System perl is 5.16.3 (but 5.26 also available) so could well be what is powering your current shared hosting.
Ubuntu 16: Already past EoL. Do not use.
Debian 9: Goes EoL in mid-2022. Why not go for 10?
Ubuntu 18: Well supported, but systemd. Why not go for 20, though?
Debian 10: Solid, released in 2019 but systemd.
CentOS 8: Goes EoL at year end. Consider Rocky or Alma or any of the other relabels instead. Still systemd, however.
Ubuntu 20: Well supported, but systemd. LTS so EoL in 2025.

Disk capacity and bandwidth are sufficient and I imagine 1 Cores and 1Gb RAM would be enough.

If you are going to be running a webserver and a database and a number of persistent perl applications 1GB is unlikely to suffice. However, most VPS providers can easily upgrade the RAM as and when you need it so you can start low and then ramp up as you approach the ceiling.

Don't forget about backups.

🦛

Comment on Re: Linux environment (was: Re^16: Recalcitrant placeholders)

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Re^2: Linux environment (was: Re^16: Recalcitrant placeholders) by Bod (Parson) on Aug 09, 2021 at 17:30 UTC
Thank you hippo - that is extremely helpful I will be the only sysadmin so Gentoo is definitely out of the question! System perl is 5.16.3 (but 5.26 also available) so could well be what is powering your current shared hosting I think you could be right... I have been looking at this article to try and find out what the shared hosting is actually running. Most of the commands they suggest are not available...at least not over SSH. But `cat /proc/version` yields: `Linux version 3.10.0-962.3.2.lve1.5.39.el7.x86_64 (mockbuild@buildfarm +2.com) (gcc version 4.8.5 20150623 (Red Hat 4.8.5-39) (GCC) ) #1 SMP +Thu Sep 17 06:10:33 EDT 2020` [download] Which looks remarkable similar to the sample output from a CentOS 7 box! but systemd I had no idea what systemd was... Looking it up, I have little more idea but, more to the point, don't know whether it is a good thing or a bad thing...the online world seems to be pretty divided on the issue.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^3: Linux environment (was: Re^16: Recalcitrant placeholders) by haukex (Archbishop) on Aug 09, 2021 at 19:17 UTC
I had no idea what systemd was... There are some interesting comments on `systemd` in some nodes by afoken starting here. I'm personally still ok with Debian and Ubuntu, but that's probably just because I've been using their style of configuration and package management for a while now. So from the list you gave above, I'd probably go with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, out of familiarity. Also, you don't necessarily need to buy a new PC, you can spin up a VM in e.g. VirtualBox pretty easily.	[reply] [d/l]
Re^4: Linux environment (was: Re^16: Recalcitrant placeholders) by Bod (Parson) on Aug 09, 2021 at 19:51 UTC
I'm getting the impression from articles such as this that some of the divide between liking `systemd` and otherwise (he says trying to be diplomatic!) are more political than technical.	[reply] [d/l]
Re^4: Linux environment (was: Re^16: Recalcitrant placeholders) by Bod (Parson) on Aug 09, 2021 at 19:56 UTC
you don't necessarily need to buy a new PC, you can spin up a VM Yes - that is probably a good way forward. I was thinking that having a Linux box as a separate machine, I might use it as a desktop for some productivity tasks and learn more about Linux in the process. But that would dilute it from being much of a replica of the webserver so perhaps better as a VM. Learning more about Linux is one of those things I have thought I ought to do for the last 20 years or so. But I would find it difficult to articulate why I should...	[reply]
Re^2: Linux environment (was: Re^16: Recalcitrant placeholders) by Bod (Parson) on Aug 09, 2021 at 17:35 UTC
Don't forget about backups Good call... Currently I have a script that takes a DB dump in the early hours of each morning and names it according to the day of the week. So there are always 7 individual days of backups available on the server. I have another script here at home that pulls those backup files off the server so I have them locally on three separate machines. So database backups are reasonably safe. I also have a script that zips up the CGI-BIN of the most critical sites and takes them offsite weekly. For a VPS I will probably need to beef this up...	[reply]