(I wrote this last week, then saved it, and just realized I forgot to hit “Publish”.)

I’ve tried, I’ve really tried, but I just can’t really get comfortable running Ubuntu as a server.  It’s just too much.

Strike one was the massive memory leak I had in my VPS when I tried Ubuntu there.  When you’re running on 1gb of dedicated memory and 1gb “disk memory”, you can’t afford to be running at those limits after 8 hours of use.  It just doesn’t work well.

Strike two came just last week, when I switched our gaming community’s dedicated server from Win2k3 to Ubuntu, and immediately fried the kernel trying to optimize it for a gameserver.  (Then, to make matters even worse, the company we rented from has horrible service, and wouldn’t even be bothered to reboot it and get it back to a usable kernel).  So that prompted a switch to a provider where I have complete root access.

We’ve been on this box with Ubuntu 10 for a few days, and it’s still a bit too much.  It’s running 100+ startup processes at boot, most of them with little to no real purpose (alot of them are “kernel protection processes”).  On top of that, when one of the servers we need to run is based on Java, it’s some bastardized version of Java.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice OS for desktop computing, and the netbook setup is pretty cool as well, but as a server, I have my doubts.

While CentOS is a bit behind on the times with some of their packages (the “default” PHP library is 5.1.6, current is like 5.3.something), at least it can be said that there’s never going to be any major issues with compatibility by being on the bleeding edge of the latest packages.  I actually ran across a software package that was maintained using only the latest version of PHP – no backwards compatibility at all.  You think someone runs a Debian flavor of linux?

Since I’ve managed to already fill up 1TB on my home server, I’ve ordered 2 new 2TB hard drives that will be delivered later this week.  Once I can get my data backed up off the server, I’ll be reformatting and going back to CentOS.  Hopefully, this won’t be too much of a pain.  I’m really comfortable with both package managers and know my way around the systems (for the most part).  So yea, should be interesting – 5.3TB server running at the house.  I’d run a full 6TB if I didn’t need the space of the 1TB on my desktop to do my backup.

We’ll see what happens.  Maybe I’ll wind up sticking with Ubuntu after all.  =/