[rt-users] Advice for New Machine

[Jay R. Ashworth]

----- "Kenneth F Crocker" <KFCrocker at lbl.gov> wrote:
>     I have been given the opportunity to have a new development zone
> created for RT. I was asked if I wanted the new zone to be Linux or
> Solaris based. So, all you gurus out there, what's best?

Sorry to be so late chiming in on this, Ken; I've been following it on my 
blackberry, but building a new 175 seat facility, and a bit tied up.
Here's my humble opinion of the answer to your question, based on 25 years
of sysadminning:

What's best is *what you know*.  I believe I've heard you say that you aren't
a particularly Unixy guy.  As a fallback, then, what's best is *what they
develop on*.  If you plan to need advice, and you have a clear field to build
in and no local talent with expertise, then what you should pick is the same
environment in which the lead developer, or the active developers most active
in giving advice, work themselves -- as their advice will then be most portable
to what you're doing.

I *think* for this crowd that that implies at least Linux, over BSD or 
Polaris, and also MySQL over PG -- I understand PG is now at least a semi-
officially supported distro, which it was not back in 3.2 days when I was
trying to go there.

Precisely which distro, I'm not sure, but I would say you picked the right
list of people to poll.  :-)

As I believe you've inferred, though, RT, like WebGUI and a couple of other 
packages, is now large and complicated enough that you don't want to be trying 
to share a machine with any other large subsystems.  It's the dirty little 
secret of componentized software that dependency hell works in more than one
way.  Once packages get complicated enough in their dependencies, they tend
to collide with one another when you try to co-reside them.

WebGUI is bad enough that it brings along *everything*: its own perl, its
own Apache, etc, etc, ad frickin nauseum.

And yet it's worth it.

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                   Baylink                      jra at baylink.com
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    I wondered "Why is that Frisbee getting bigger?"  And then it hit me.