How Gentoo has Helped Me
IT Chapters 1 Comment »I don’t think there is enough press around Gentoo. Therefore I will provide some. 
The company that I work for is very much a Microsoft based company. We use Access, Word, Excel, Outlook, a mixture of Windows 2000 and XP machines and two 2000 servers. I develop in ASP.NET and C# (the best web development platform around, in my opinion) and our systems are definitely geared in the “Microsoft Way”. So you may ask, why are you using Linux in your environment?
Before we start, lets get some basic facts straight. I like to think I sit above the whole Microsoft/Linux argument. I don’t believe that there is any point in the whole fan-boy attitude that seems to surround the two platforms. Both are incredibly good and powerful and can provide pretty much exactly the same experience to the user. I believe that since software is market driven, the best product will always come to the surface for each person’s individual requirements. You can push your favourite as hard as you like but most people will always pick the solution that fits the needs of the requirements. I just think Microsoft in most cases provides the best solutions. 
Coupled with this, I use and work with Microsoft’s technologies every single day. As I said above, I develop applications in C# (both ASP.NET and Winforms) and manage a legacy Access application. The technologies that come out of Microsoft are definitely world-class and deserve all the attention that they get (and sometimes don’t get).
But lets get back to the reason why I still use Linux and specifically Gentoo and I’ll pay specific attention to my situation and why I chose a Gentoo machine over a Windows Server solution. As a small accounting company, our IT budget is not one of the biggest. We have spent the money when required, but with licensing fees and the cost of new machines, we don’t have the resources that other companies might have.
With our company growing, the pressures on the servers that we had grew. We needed another DNS server, our mail was not being screened for viruses, spam was out of control, we required a bugs database, my sales department wanted us to provide basic IT facilities (webmail, webspace) for clients and our infrastructure simply couldn’t keep up. So the decision was taken by myself to install a small Gentoo machine in our office to test the viability of integrating it to our current infrastructure. With the great help and guidance from Grant within 2 days we had a small box running in the office. And by small I definitely mean small. An old AMD K6 with 256 MB of RAM and a 40GB harddrive put together meant the birth of our first gentoo machine.
The box (nicknamed Dustpuppy) was placed between the internet router and our LAN. Acting as a router initially, Apache and BIND were quickly installed supplying us with our badly needed secondary DNS server (primary in come cases) and the basis for the webspace we now provided.
Within a month we had a full webmail setup running with our clients now having an account for all their email and requirements. Within 2 months Dustpuppy was running most of the internet infrastructure in the office. Within 6 months, I now have daily off-site backups of our source code, databases and all our application files with a 1 month restore period to an external server. Including Apache, we now have BIND public facing to serve the clients’ domains, the mail server now handling over 150 domains worth of email traffic, shorewall to handle any firewall issues and OpenVPN to handle the VPN connections from staff at home. I have to admit, we had to upgrade the AMD to a new machine not because the machine couldn’t handle it, just to upgrade the parts since the machine now over 5 years old.
But what about Gentoo? All I’ve spoken about here is how Linux has helped me shape our business into a more efficient company without saying “How Gentoo has helped me”. With Gentoo as my distribution, I have sucessfully installed all these packages, upgraded them, kept them up to date and kept a streamlined server with the minimal of effort. Portage (the package management application) in Gentoo is a piece of genius. The work gone in there allows admins to seamlessly work with packages within their system and make sure that everything “just works”. Considering the amount of work I throw at the machine, including mailing lists and the off-site backups the machine takes it all in it’s stride and completes the task incredibly quickly.
So if you’re in my situation with large needs and small resources, take the best solution to your problems. Which in my opinion is Gentoo. I’ve never looked back, and I doubt I ever will.
