Linux flavours / OS choice

[Runefox]

So I've very recently gotten a VDS from NFO and so far I've been quite pleased. I haven't had much of a chance to set everything up yet, and in that light I'd been reading up about the various setups that NFO recommends. The Linux/Windows debate could go on forever, and I'm still kind of torn between them, but I did notice that NFO recommends using their flavour of Gentoo because of some modifications that NFO has done to their install. I took a look around the forums, but I couldn't find any more information on it than that.

Currently, my VDS is running Debian Squeeze. I have experience with Gentoo as well, though I'm more familiar with Debian/Ubuntu overall, which is why I chose it initially. I guess my biggest question is what is it exactly that NFO does with Gentoo that makes it ideal for game servers, aside from Gentoo's normal advantage of natively-compiled code? Is it simply a kernel configuration, or is there more to it than that? I'm at a stage where it isn't exactly inconvenient to start over, as I can save my configs and move on. I'm not running anything production at the moment.

So would there be a clear advantage in moving to Gentoo? For that matter, and this had to come up at some point, in what situation would Windows Server be a better choice (as I'm aware that both have their advantages)?

[FlyingMongoose]

Gentoo is compiled natively on the machines NFO provides. This means that the machines in which gentoo was compiled on are the machines in which it will be running. This often helps with performance.

I also believe that NFO runs a customer kernel for Gentoo which helps in creating much more efficient game servers and higher FPS's on said game servers, this is also common practice from a lot of providers, one of their lead competitors utilizes a modified kernel CentOS, but CentOS is a somewhat bloated Linux considering it's built to have "all the utilities necessary for an enterprise server environment pre-installed", like mail servers, and web servers, and server-side scripting languages, and whatnot. Which a lot of game servers really don't need.

Ultimately though, you're right the debate can go back and forth between a number of distributions, kernels, and windows vs. *nix, the real question is what works best for you, and what are you most comfortable with. You want to be able to be efficient as a server administrator, so find something that you can do and work quickly and efficiently with.

[Edge100x]

I generally recommend Debian to our customers because it is a pretty lean OS and is kept up-to-date well (unlike CentOS, which uses much older, but theoretically more stable, software releases).

The unmanaged Gentoo install is a pretty standard configuration, so there's nothing too special about it. The managed install is our optimized configuration with various "secret sauce" tweaks and kernel code I wrote to maximize performance.

[rustydusty1717]

How much for the kernel?

Haven't asked for a while, eh!

[Runefox]

Ahh, thanks, that clears things up a bit. Though I wouldn't mind getting my hands on that kernel.

I'll stick with Debian for now then, and I'll roll my own kernel config.

[Elochai]

I generally recommend Debian to our customers because it is a pretty lean OS and is kept up-to-date well (unlike CentOS, which uses much older, but theoretically more stable, software releases).

The unmanaged Gentoo install is a pretty standard configuration, so there's nothing too special about it. The managed install is our optimized configuration with various "secret sauce" tweaks and kernel code I wrote to maximize performance.

So I am going to try ND on the single core Linux box and was searching the forums to see which version I should use. I am not going back to Ubuntu as it just a headache when typing Linux / Unix commands I know and getting errors saying they took them options away.

Fedora was ok, but that option not there and I haven't heard much in a long time on fedora servers.

CentOS is nice but your right, it over loaded from what I seen from our cash system server at work, lots of crap not needed.

Debian I tested once and didn't have enough time to form a option, and Gentoo I don't believe I used at all.

So seeing im going to buy the single core VDS to try and host ND which I am not sure how much memory or CPU power is needed to run a full 32 player server. Would the tweets in the Gentoo version be the best pick or is the Debian version better as you said you recommend it. Updates don't matter as I only want to run a ND server, not websites or databases.

[Elochai]

Well I went with Debian and so far it seems good. I am rusty tho with remembering commands lol

[p3dsman]

I generally recommend Debian to our customers because it is a pretty lean OS and is kept up-to-date well (unlike CentOS, which uses much older, but theoretically more stable, software releases).

The unmanaged Gentoo install is a pretty standard configuration, so there's nothing too special about it. The managed install is our optimized configuration with various "secret sauce" tweaks and kernel code I wrote to maximize performance.

Couldn't agree more! Debian has been the best experience for me AND the players over the last 6 months and counting. If your running source dedicated servers, in my experience, make sure to keep system software up-to-date such as C++ libs and it will run very nice indeed.