Server Testing

This page is our record of testing different distributions of Linux for use on our server.

Criteria

We wanted a server build that would be faster (fewer resources) than our current (As of June 16, 2011, we are running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, but the desktop edition). The motivation for this is that we wanted a clean install of our server, which provides a good opportunity for re-installation.

Ubuntu 11.04 Server edition

Finding the server edition was a little more difficult, since the Argonne National Laboratory mirror didn't have it quite where we thought it would be. Installation is easy (since we're used to it), since it's all apt-get based. No GUI is running on this system.

Performance

With the entire LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP), htop shows 26 tasks, 175M RAM used, 0 swap used, and .7% of processor time used.

CentOS

CentOS was easy to find, but the basic ISO is just a live disk. We decided to run the netInstall version, and then pull the correct version off of the Argonne National Laboratory mirror. There did not appear to be a "server" edition of 5.6, although there did seem to be one of 5.1 and 4.7 (Not sure about those numbers).

The biggest problem we've experienced with CentOS so far is that it does NOT run Grub config. The next time the machine boots it boots to the grub command prompt.

Find the menu.lst. For us, it was /grub/menu.lst. Normally, it's located in /boot/grub/menu.lst. The command you need to run is

configfile (hd0,0)/grub/menu.lst

Then, we had the problem that it pointed to the wrong HD, so hit "e" to go to the options, hit "e" again and change it from (hd1,0) to (hd0,0).

To install htop on CentOS requires the rpmforge repository. Follow the instructions here.

Performance

With LAMP installed, htop shows 99 tasks running, but there appear to be a number of blank lines. Memory usage is at 128M, swap is at 0. Processor usage was, once again, negligible idling.

Scientific Linux 6.0

I have rebuilt the USB

Packages We Installed

Software	Ubuntu Package Name (apt-get)	CentOS Package Name (yum)	Scientific Linux Package Name (yum)
Apache Webserver (Worker)	apache2-mpm-worker	httpd	asdf
MYSQL	mysql-server	mysql	asdf
PHP5	php5	php	asdf
Open SSH (SSH server)	openssh-server	openssh-server	asdf
Simple Network Management Protocol	snmp	net-snmp	asdf
PHP My Admin	phpmyadmin	phpmyadmin	asdf
Postfix (Mail protocol)	postfix	postfix	asdf