On Thu, Nov 08, 2007 at 07:52:15PM -0800, Jeff Grossman wrote: > I know this question is going to get a variety of answers, but I would like > to get everybody's opinion. I am currently running Testing with a few > packages from Sid. why? this is important. You need to understand the reasons why you are doing/considering this. There are no wrong answers, just that you need to know what your motivations are so that when the excrement hits the air mover, you can remind youself of why you're doing it. ;-) > I just moved to Debian a few weeks ago. Congrats and welcome! > I am running > Debian as a home server which handles a website, e-mail server, samba > server, a few other small server applications. publicly available server? if so, sid may not be such a great idea. But it really depends on what you're doing. If you're only serving up static html, getting mail with fetchmail or somesuch (i.e. not listening for mail), then you're probably okay. If you're serving up dynamic stuff with server-side scripting and logins and so forth, or accepting mail directly, then its probably not a good idea. Use a good firewall. > I am really the only user > except for e-mail, I have about 4 users total on the system. How tolerant is your family of losing service from this server? I have a nice little home server with all our music, photos, video, mail, personal web pages etc on it. Its a pretty sweet little setup, lots of fun, but if my wife can't get to the music, I'm screwed (or not, as the case may be). So that thing runs stable with long uptimes. Its really nice have serious high availability at home :) > More than > anything running Linux is a complete learning experience for me. sid is great for this. maybe look at running your personal desktop on it's a lot of fun and you learn quickly. > I have > noticed that it takes at least 10 days, if not more, to get updated > packages from unstable to testing. this is debian policy and is how it works. IMO, and I've said it many times before, testing is not a good choice for newbies or people who desire reasonable availability. Much better to stick with stable or move to sid. Sid gets fixed pretty quickly, in general, unlike testing which can stay broken for quite a while. > How dangerous would it be for me to > move completely to unstable? depends on how you define danger and what you do to mitigate risk. backup backup backup and be sure to remember to take good backups. > Has anybody completely trashed their system > by running unstable? I'm sure many people have trashed their systems *while* running sid, but how much of that is sid's fault is debatable. > I like to live on the cutting edge, but I also don't > want my machine to completely die where it won't boot up anymore. this depends on how you define "boot up." If by "boot up" you mean, pushing the power button and getting all the way through a successful login with out interaction (other than the login itself), then sid is maybe not for you. It works this way to at least one 9 and probably something like three 9's, but stuff does break. Now, if by "boot up" you mean "I can scrape together a way to get the system back up and running somehow" then yes sid is for you. You need to be prepared to find your way around a busybox shell, to boot with a live-cd of some kind to chroot into the system, to restore part or all of the system from backups (really rare, IMO), revert/downgrade package changes, etc etc etc. It's really rare for this stuff to happen, but it does happen. Learning how to deal with it is fun and rewarding (for me anyway) and getting a system to boot when all it want to do is sit there and blink at you is very gratifying. If that applies to you, then maybe sid would be appropriate. I occurs to me that we should build an FAQ or wiki entry somewhere addressing this. A nice little quiz might be fun with recommendations about whether to run sid or not based ont he results of the quiz. A
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