Ubuntu gaining ground in website deployments Although it has chiefly been known as a desktop Linux distribution, Ubuntu has been gaining ground in data centers as well, according to the latest statistics from web survey outfit W3Techs. In figures compiled on Thursday, 7 per cent of all the world's web servers were found to be running Ubuntu, up from 5.5 per cent the …
Although the Ubuntu figures might be pretty accurate, the 47% of that "unknown" component of "Unix", in fact, do represent Debian, CentOS, RHEL or other
And BTW, that Redmond's 35.8% is quite funny. Indeed, as to netcraft IIS takes up about 17% (with most active ones it is even less). In the 2011 survey as well as earlier ones indicate a 4% upper bound for the Apache-on-Windows figure. 6% for FreeBSD.
Some time ago, it used to be somewhat undesirable to run Apache on Windows. nginx on Windows is also fresh and even more uncouth. (On the other hand, a transition from FreeBSD to Linux of some flavor is well discernible as well. Russian Federation, one of the last major strongholds of FreeBSD, is now being noticed in this trend. Say, among the large firms, like rambler, yandex, mail.ru as of now only the first former is still holding on to it. )
So doing a little bit arithmetic (4%of 57% ) we have 17%+2% for MS Windows when both IIS and Apache are considered. I bet nginx, google and others would make a close to 0 figure. What we are getting at, as a result, is 20% of Redmond's webservers share. QED
If they could be a bit more professional about ensuring that upgrades dont completely break the system (such as is the case with 10.04 LTS -> 12.04 LTS) they would be pretty near perfect.
Debian is good but suffers from not providing any sort of roadmap whatsoever. A lack of roadmap is OK for enthusiasts but is problematic if you are deploying in a commercial environment.
RHEL/CentOS are good too, although I personally don't like the YUM/RPM system and their repositories are pretty barren compared to debian/ubuntu. It's worth noting that these guys don't seem to offer any sort of major version upgrade path at all. Well not from 5.n to 6.n anyway. Official advice is to reinstall from scratch although there are some howto's that provide a hugely convoluted process that they recommend against actually attempting.
Fedora on a server? All I can say is WTF? And yes, we actually have a Fedora server in production where I work. That wasn't my doing of course.
Suse I haven't tried but I expect it is not a lot different to the other RPM distros.
I had some servers running Ubuntu a few years ago but many hardware-specific software/drivers for things like a APC UPS and our 3Ware RAID cards were a total nightmare to get working. Whereas they were all also provided as RHEL binaries which worked perfectly on CentOS. Since then I've never considered using anything other then CentOS.
So the repos might be bare and service versions are conservative... but that's sort of the point of a server distribution. Any services you really need that aren't available from repos can be easily compiled in most cases. If there's a problem compiling from source then generally someone's already been there and done it.
The only negative point I would raise about CentOS is the delay in getting 6 out after RHEL 6 had been around for over 6 months. But it's free and brilliant, so I'm not going to complain.
The fact that one distro over another in secondary in relation to WHY.
What does Ubuntu Server improve on or offer that the others don't ?
Ubuntu is a UI, I don't understand why Apache, Mysql would really care about the front end of the OS.
Is it just because the newbies have been fed on Shuttleworth marketing or is there a real reason ....
It is an operating system, --- available with a variety of desktop UIs, or roll your own. Or stick to a terminal, if that is all your server requires. If you want a windowing desktop, then, quite apart from all the Something-else-buntus, you can chose your own. Mine is Ubuntu Studio, which comes with xfce, but I use MATE.
Shuttleworth madness? Perhaps it's Unity you're thinking of?
With Linux it is often difficult to discern what the term OS really means - Linux itself is the Kernel. And most people confuse "Linux" as being an OS, it is not.
The Linux Kernel takes care of the various IO requests, disk read and write and memory management etc. Personally I find it difficult not to consider this as being the OS, after all it is doing all of the operating.
Obviously at the kernel does not provide a UI, nor a compiler, nor the miriad of other programs that we need to successfully make a machine usefull. This I believe is where the border lies as to what constitues an OS.
Ubuntu is a layer around the kernel, Ubuntu does not do memory management , disk write/reads or process IO commands. It merely provides a connection to the Kernel in order that these tasks can be performed. Can it therefore be considered an OS. Just as any other distros......
It is a mute point that could be argued forever but I want to at explain my reasoning behind "Ubuntu is an UI".
PS ( Yes, I agree that the kernel on its own would not be able to do very much)
Apologies, but it's one of my pet peeves....
Yes! In the same way as, for instance AIX is.
AIX is, of course, IBM's version, presentation, or implementation of Unix, just other *nixes belonged to their particular platforms.
Ubuntu is Ubuntu's implementation of Linux, gnu and a handful of optional user interfaces. The borders of "ubuntuness" are, perhaps, very very blurred, but the border of UI, or "desktop" is much less so. Ubuntu is the package, and, come to think of it, the packaging,
Unless of course you have an incredibly broad definition of "UI," in which case I'll just be ...mute :)
Whilst techniques like TCP fingerprinting can determine, say, a Linux kernel is being run, it only takes "ServerTokens Apache" in the site's Apache config to effectively hide exactly which Linux distro is used.
In fact, typical penetration test software actually recommends that you *do* hide the Apache and OS versions, so it's likely a fair number of sysadmins do this as standard policy (and maybe some distros ship a config with this done too?).
Personally, I'm a fan of CentOS - tools like Open Manage Server Administrator on Dell kit is fully supported (though their dumb DSET tool forces you to fake /etc/issue and /etc/redhat-release with RHEL strings, just like the way Oracle's DB installer has to be fooled), plus you get 10 years of updates (more than any other Linux server distro).
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