[Sysadmin] Server upgrade

[William Anderson]

David Kaufman wrote:
> Hi William,
> 
> "William Anderson" <neuro at well.com> wrote:
>> David Kaufman wrote:
>>> 2. I saw a chance to upgrade our operating system from Debian 3 to 4
>>>    (sarge to etch), putting us within reach of the MySQL 5 and PHP5
>>>    upgrades people have been hoping for recently (required by the latest
>>>    and greatest Drupal and MediaWiki versions), and
>> ugh
> 
> What do you ugh?  The new PHP, Drupal or MediaWiki?  (can't be MySQL, could 
> it?)

None of the above, as my later comments will clarify :)

> [snip]
>> To me, ubuntu hardy made a lot more sense (LTS release, 7 years of
>> updates guaranteed) than etch did (lenny will be out in a month or two,
>> we'll be stuck back to running oldstable, and our updates will stop
>> again in a year or two).
> 
> That surprised me!  I know Ubuntu has become incredibly popular, but I 
> haven't used it personally (or professionally) and I had always thought of 
> it as a *desktop* distro, filled with big bloated GUI, gnomey and KDE-ey 
> apps.  I didn't know that Canonical had made a server variant.  Now that 
> I'm looking into it, it sure does seem like a nice choice, though.

Yeah.  It's the fact you get security updates for 7 years that appeals
to me the most.  The parts we really need will be almost
indistinguishable from etch or lenny (in fact Ubuntu packages come from
sid before going through Canonical's own build and QA process, so I've
no doubt Ubuntu hardy [8.04 LTS] will be pretty close to lenny rather
than etch in terms of version numbers, and 8.10 will be ahead still).

-n