Annvix Development Blog

I have been running annvix as server, (e.g. email, DNS, web, source control…etc) since 1.0. Recently, I have been using it as development machines for my RD Department.

My group is focusing to embedded Linux development, which means we need to have a perfectly working (and standard compliance) machine to install tons of cross compilers and tools for each different Hardware/solution providers. The previous group was using mostly Fedora, Ubuntu based distributions, although they look ok at first glance, it fails in a lot of areas since Fedora and Ubuntu is trying to be too user friendly. This is especially true for Ubuntu, the shell script inside the Makefile doesn’t even work as ‘expected’ without some tuning. (trust me, I have used more than 5 well known distributions, ubuntu was very troublesome for embedded development environment)

Of course, my post is not about how bad other ones are, and how good annvix are. Different distribution serves for different purposes.

I just want to express my success with annvix distribution and proud to be one of the developer .

My RD department currently have one source control server and four development server (aka, build machines) and engineers are really happy with the stability and performance of the system.

This is great work!

The following testimonial was sent on the users@ mailing list on Feb 14th by David:

Well, I’ve had fun getting Annvix set up. Using a PIII-750MHz, and base install was barely over 300 MB. After installing apache + php, and my folding program, I am now using annvix as experimental web server at admiral.ath.cx and also for folding client – see http://fortressdataprotection.com/folding

I formerly used Trustix Secure Linux, but development was stopped this year, so I was looking for a seceure server distro that would run on older hardware. Annvix is it! Thanks for a great distro! And for great support. I love it, and plan to experiment with its capabilities for use as web server and for running other select apps. THANKS FOR ANNVIX.

Thanks for the kind words, David!

There was an independent review done of Annvix on Linux.com today (for once, this is a review done by someone other than myself). It was actually a pretty good review. Check it out here: www.linux.com/feature/124243.

For those of you looking at why I use Annvix, let
me elaborate how important EOL and online upgrade for me. And to me,
annvix does the job for me.

Over my 10 years of experiences with the servers, and I am going to talk
about the Linux as OS Three things are probably the worst
nightmare and most important to me as the administrator.

1. EOL of the distribution, which means mandatory upgrade if I want to
keep the software up to date (for security reasons)

2. Ease of the upgrade process.

3. Is online upgrade possible (or must be offline)

Item 2 and 3 are usually go hand to hand though. For first item, EOL of
most of the ‘free’ distributions are about 1 – 1.5 years. Which means,
when you finally get a version working (that’s about 3-6 months after
distribution is released), you only have less than 1 year left. That
means you’ll start preparing a upgrade when the EOL comes if you really
want to keep the security patch up to date and be able to sleep well at
night. This really force me to do upgrade almost every 1 – 1.5 years,
and it really too much work…..
so, since the upgrade is necessary to make sure the system is ‘free’
from hackers, how easy the upgrade process becomes important. For most
of the ‘Bigger’ distributions, due to its ‘HUGE’ and complex nature,
upgrade usually breaks badly and I normally just install a fresh copy of
new version (usually on the new harddisk) and just port the data
manually afterwards. The whole thing usually takes about 1 full day (if
I am lucky), and about a week to make sure everything works.

Finally, since I have several machines co-lo at else where. (Right now,
I live in Taiwan, and couple of my servers are still in the U.S.) To be
able to do remote online upgrade becomes very important. I can afford to
call the ISP to reboot the machine, but there is no way they will be
able to upgrade for me. Thanks to Annvix, which supports online upgrade,
and I have successfully upgrade from version 1.0 -> 1.1 -> 1.2 -> 2.0
and I am looking forward to the new release next year. Yes, we all know
eventually I’ll need to do fresh install just to cleanup everything, but
because of remote online upgrade, it really makes EOL of the server
software to 3-4 years (at least) which really ease my job.

If you run production servers 24/7, you’ll understand how cool this feature is!

Here’s a new testimonial I received today (thanks for sharing, Boyce!)

“I was looking for a small distribution that I could gain experience with that would also be secure and active. Annvix fits that bill for me. It has easy to use tools without the bloat that comes from bigger distributions. I use it as my reliable home server. It provides the services I need to my other computers like file sharing, iSCSI and HTTP in a way that I know I can rely on freeing me to experiment and learn without having to do a lot of maintenance.

Boyce Crownover – System Administrator
Watauga TX“

Alright, its my turn to upgrade:

I have just updated one of my production server handling source controls and bugzilla:

overall, the migration scripts works! but I did have couple scary moments that we need to
improve:

1. I only get the full annvix/releases/2.0-RELEASE tree from the server,
and it turns out to be NOT ENOUGH, since the upgrade script is also
looking for annvix/release/i586… and other places, this cause the
upgrade script to fail. (good thing i have other windows open that can
do a quick sync from the web and have the script ‘retry’ to avoid the catastrophic failure.)

2. after upgrade, swap doesn’t get turned up automatically, its kindda
weird, /etc/fstab did include the swap, and when i do swapon -a, it
works..did you forget to put swapon in the init script?
3. named is broken by default, /etc/rndc.key is causing the problem, I
just remove the content from this file, then named works again.

4. I did have some weird dependency problems that apt-get is claiming i
have multiple version of openssh running (I had to manually remove the
extra ones from other terminals to make it happy)

anyhow, this machine is pretty much working again (bugzilla just works! i was surprised that all the modules still works)

took me about an hour on that fairly fast machines

PS. I noticed that sshd daemon is on during the whole process.. this is
very good, and i am glad the upgrade script didn’t fool with sshd daemon
(at least i didn’t noticed) because during the upgrade, 3 windows are
simply not enough…. i keep opening more terminals….)

4 more to go….. =)