Re: Probably been asked a hundred times before.

At 10:30 PM 6/24/2008, David Siebert wrote:
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>Which disto is best for running a Postgres server?
>I just installed OpenSuse and downloaded and compiled the latest version
>of Postgres. It isn't that big of a hassle but I noticed that almost
>none of the big distros keep all that up to date with Postgres as far as
>what they have in their repositories.
>
>I was wondering if anybody has made an Postgres centric distro? Just a
>nice stripped down server Distro that is ideal for running a database
>server on?

To me an ideal server distro to use would be one which:
1) will run a reasonably recent postgresql release
2) is stable, reliable and hopefully doesn't have painful bugs.
3) performs reasonably well
4) has reasonable hardware support
5) can monitor the required hardware and respond appropriately

Stripped down distros often do not do 5), and 5) is quite important to me.

For example:
I'd want to know if any of the drives in the RAID that my database
sits on is having problems (and to trigger an email alert)
I'd also would like the O/S to be able to know if the UPSes the
server runs off are on battery and start an automatic shutdown at the
appropriate time.

Rather than waiting for the battery to be low (which appears to be
the default for NUTS), I personally prefer my servers to shutdown
much earlier. If the generators have not started within a minute I'd
assume they are not going to start. One reason is because if
someone/something restarts the server and the system is still on
battery or goes back on battery again, the batteries will be more
likely to have enough charge for another boot up and shutdown cycle.
Not sure if more recent versions of NUTS can do what I want without
modification.

I had some problems with NUTS on opensuse 10.3 - some
filesystem/device permission problems and also hald-addon-hid-ups had
a mem leak, and over time tried to use up all mem (not good for the
O/S to run out of mem and kill the DB server). I have not tried version 11.

Regards,
Link.