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Comment by andai | Hacker News Reader

Somewhat tangential but is Arch really suitable for servers? Most Arch users I know still prefer Debian for servers. Yet I know at least one company that uses them for servers, which surprised me. I know the Arch breaking meme is overblown but for a server I'd still want something with less moving parts.

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That big release upgrades provide more hassle than benifits was also observed by Google, hence they switched to rolling release. The reason Debian breaks more at release changes though is probably more due to them patching and modifying software, which they have sometimes have to change/drop with a new SW release. Or you have a hard time deploying a newer SW version on top of the old binaries. Arch follows upstream very close, which maybe increases the times things could/have to be reconfigured, but it still mostly means running vimdiff against config.conf and config.conf.pac{new,save}. Sure Debian is more reliable if you want do want to really change deployed systems, but if your company strategy is to keep up with upstream, Arch may work better than it's reputation.

And if you'd need stability once, you could just set Archive on a specific day as package mirror on your cache server.

If this was going to be used for some "big and serious" application, maybe different choices would have been made. Hopefully it was clear from the post that my goals here were the exact opposite!

In my own anecdotal experience of running a hobby server on Arch for several years, I haven't experienced anything to make me think the distro is unsuitable for server work.

I've used debian for almost twenty years and arch for over half that, despite being comfortable with Arch, I would not sleep well at night if anything mission critical depended on it. You install a rig with Debian on it and touch nothing, it will last longer than you.

No, it will not last longer than you. If you want security updates, you have to do major ditro upgrades when the support for previous Debian release is over. And these are somewhat tricky.

You'll just have your upgrade dance clustered into a single event once every N years, instead of spread over randomly, based on major releases of SW your server depends on.

> Somewhat tangential but is Arch really suitable for servers?

I think we all use the software we choose to use in order to use the software we choose to use. When we build a cluster, it's often done in order to build a cluster.

Depending on what you use it for, you'll have to babysit your servers more and you'll not be able to do it on your own timeline.

Eg. if major postgresql update comes, you'll have to upgrade your DB cluster very soon. If major update to some program requires configuration changes, or if scripting language has deprecations that you've ignored for years, etc. you'll run into trouble, too.

I've been running a few Arch Linux servers for ~5 years and it's been quite pleasant. Being able to use the latest features in various programs or scripting languages is a very nice benefit.

For pine stuff I had more issues with hardware than software. So in the end you’d still have to babysit a bit even if using fedora hat enterprise serious edition.

Run wathever on sd card on its most basic thing. Run lxc and mount storage on /var/lib/lxc.

Well… at least its what I’ve wish I could say.

Truth is I’m using manjaro (arch based) on a similar board and then one day after an upgrade they just decided to migrate from eth0 to the current naming scheme based on nic driver. Had to plug in a monitor and keyboard to fix the situation. Home stuff so its all good in my case.

Arch is totally fine for a home server.

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