This week, the server hosting this blog, and a number of my online services, failed from a dying hard drive.  I maintain daily snapshots of critical directories like /home and /etc with rsnapshot.  Periodically, I’ll also rsync over a full copy of root.  I figured a quick swap of the drive, a long rsync, and we’d be back in business.

I was wrong.

The backup drive where I held the full backup wouldn’t spin up.  The daily snapshots were intact, but the OS was shot.  I’ve used Gentoo on my servers, off and on, for almost the past ten years now.  If there’s a prevalent Linux server distribution out there, I’ve probably used it.  I’ve also had my share of the BSDs.  I always come back to Gentoo … until now.

A sysadmin gig a few years back exposed me to Debian.  I enjoyed the rapid installation of packages that came with a binary distribution.  I’ve also come to appreciate the stability and maturity of Debian.  While a few upgrades bit me in the ass over the years; new tools like etckeeper help minimize this problem.

Truthfully, though, I’ve grown tired of the compile times associated with Gentoo.  There’s also the occasional upgrade that breaks shit in true WTF fashion.  These are the upgrades that send me scrambling to the IRC channel and forums for help.  And while the people there are very friendly and very helpful, I can easily kill a day or two fixing a problem I shouldn’t have had in the first place.  QA just seems more “effective” on Debian.

Now before you think I’m totally tearing down Gentoo, stop.  Gentoo still has its place.  It’s still a great Linux distribution.  If you’ve never used Portage or USE flags, try them out sometime.  I guarantee you’re in for a treat! The system is just that powerful.  I still run a fair number of Gentoo machines at home and I don’t see that ending anytime soon.

I find I’m at a stage in my life where I really don’t want to be banging my head against the wall with system upgrades on critical servers (i.e., machines serving my email, DNS, et cetera).  Yes, we need upgrades, especially security upgrades.  If I can spend less time doing upgrades and more time enjoying my life, I’m going to do that.  I still enjoy running my own systems and don’t see myself converting to Google Apps anytime soon.  I just figured I’d try and rationalize the sudden switch in Linux distributions.