For various reasons I need to change from my initial Fedora 13 64-bit distribution to a 32-bit distribution. I really should never have started with a 64-bit distribution. I just had some initial bad advice from a co-worker.

The easiest way seems to be to create a new Linode, copy over relevant data (all in one directory) to the new Linode and then shut down my original Linode. That seems easier and also less expensive than trying to create a new distribution within the same Linode, even though I will have to change my DNS settings. Do people generally agree with that?

My main question then is which distribution to go for. I'm running a server (not Apache, a custom server). It's not really cpu intensive, but it uses a lot of memory and, of course, I want the serving to be as quick as possible.

Between Fedora, Ubuntu and CentOS is there an obviously preferable distribution for this kind of situation? Or does it really just depend on which Linux I'm most familiar with?

I would classify myself as a long-term Linux user yet not by any means an expert.

Any suggestions?

Thanks!

doug

I decided to take a leap and go for the Ubunto 10.10 32-bit distribution. It was remarkably easy to tar up my data and transfer it to the new distribution. I was done in a few minutes.

And all the problems I was having with the 64-bit system went away. The Ubuntu 10.10 32-bit system runs very well. I'm impressed.

I look forward to adding more and more linodes for my own customers now that I am getting used to it. Running a separate linode for each customer is much nicer than trying to do do multiple IPs and servers on a single shared instance.


doug

You may want to consider downgrading to ubuntu 10.04 due to ubuntu's support cycles.

10.04 is LTS (long term support) 10.10 isn't as you can see by the pretty graph here

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LTS

10.04 is supported until 2015 where 10.10 only until 2012.

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Thanks for the suggestion. After the trouble I've had I'm sort of in an "if it works don't fix it" mood.

But after I see that things are running stably I'll look into how one downgrades.

Thanks!

doug

No, I don't agree. You can swap IP addresses between the two linodes from the control panel. No DNS changes required.

Other than that, I prefer Debian to Ubuntu because of stability. The difference between Debian and Ubuntu is similiar to the difference between Fedora and CentOS. The current stable version of Debian, however, tends to have somewhat older versions of everything. If you really want the new versions that come with Ubuntu, you should follow obs's suggestion and use the LTS version.

Any RPM based distribution is unreliable, they tend to correupt themselves, or used to.

I run my site on Ubuntu latest and have zero issues, I'm not rocket scientist so I must conclude that it is stable.

Yeah, that must be why the ONLY two enterprise Linux Distro's (Redhat/CentOS and SUSE) use it.

Enterprise just means it comes with an expensive support contract in case something goes wrong. It doesn't mean nothing will go wrong. After all, things must go wrong just often enough to make the buyer feel good about having purchased the support contract

Having said that, I hear YUM is pretty good at tracking dependencies these days. But APT reached that milestone a long time ago.

Um...not really.

Enterprise solutions mean there's a PAID staff doing development, Q&A, and Support - all with the goal of maximizing profit.

Since having or fixing problems cost money - Enterprise solutions put way more effort up front to minimize the number of errors that slip thru QA.

If RPM was the huge suck that some propose, it would have been stripped from the Enterprise Linux Distro's many many releases ago. Since it hasn't - it's a safe bet to say most of the naysayers regarding RPM is either misinformed, out of date, or just plain FUD.

As with most tech problems, most of RPM's problems come to light when people go off the beaten path and roll their own packages. Then things can go tits up - and who do they blame - the person who rolled the package or the package manager?

tl;dr: all software sucks

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I'm curious as to why you would switch 64-bit -> 32-bit then and what sort of problems you were having.

The server hardware itself is 64-bit - software runs faster compiled for 64-bit (especially databases). It is true that code may take up a small amount more RAM, but then even the smallest Linodes are pretty big these days...

As to how to do this, well it sounds like it's done already, but yes I agree that setting up a new Linode at the same datacenter and copying data across is better than doing it all on one. That way the old one can still be alive while you are setting up the new one, you're not limited to having only one of the two booted at once, you don't have to shrink partitions or leave free space in your Linode, and you may be less likely to make mistakes.

I'm probably of the opposite opinion, in terms of asking why bother running 64-bit? In fact the availability of 32-bit builds on Linode was attractive to me compared to some of its competitors.

It's not like you need it to address the limited memory for the majority of VPS configurations. And mileage varies depending on actual usage and type of application, but the growth in memory usage (which is not necessary "a small amount") might not be worth any performance gains, or could even offset them if less memory is available for caching. Even in cases such as databases whose engines have shown an improvement in 64-bit binaries, it's relative to usage patterns, and I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of VPS databases are heavily influenced by I/O overhead, in which case freeing up memory for caching is even more important.

For example, http://www.linode.com/forums/viewtopic. ... 9299#29299 - in absolute terms the memory growth may not be considered huge, but it's pretty darn big in relative terms, so scale it for other stuff you may add. I'd rather hang onto the extra 35MB for database caching than blow it on 64-bit. I/O has a high risk of being a severe bottleneck on a VPS, so I prefer to do everything I can to minimize the risk associated with it.

And not all software automatically runs faster in 64-bit. See http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison where 32-bit won the unixbench tests.

(Asssume obligatory comments about applicability and interpretation of benchmarks has been inserted here)

With that said, for a given application, it's also easy enough to spin up two Linodes and benchmark the actual application to see if it benefits more from one or the other.

-- David