Last week, we performed a long needed upgrade to the company
file/print/intranet server. Basically, we'd been on a Redhat 8 system, and
there were upgrades we were wanting to perform, and couldn't due to lack of
libraries. We could have possibly compiled from source in some occasions...
but that would likely have shuttled us into a similar dependency hell as
using Redhat in the first place.
So, we decided to re-install the OS, and switch to Gentoo in the process.
We've found that Gentoo is a great distro for servers -- it allows us to
tailor the install to the server purpose, and simultaneously provides a
clean upgrade path via portage.
Things went primarily without a hitch. We lost a few databases due to a bad
DB backup (argh! there went the wiki!), but that was the primary extent of
the damage.
When investigating the sytem post-install, I discovered some connectivity
issues with Samba. Basically, when connecting via a *nix-based machine, we
were getting symlinks reported as being local to the connecting machine, not
the server. This meant that symlinks on the server weren't being followed --
which caused major issues for those connecting via FTP, Mac, or Linux.
