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CentOS 4.1 64-bit + CPanel
By: Atlas-Tuesday

After a horrible experience using Windows XP 64-bit, I decided to give Linux a chance to prove 64-bit technology is mature enough for production use. The server is going to be doing a “minimal” installation which should keep things fairly simple. However we’re going to install a copy of CPanel to continue to test control panels. This should add a little complexity to an otherwise vanilla installation.

INSTALL OS
The installation process is the same as it has always been. Things went very smooth, and it automatically dedicated my 3ware RAID controller. I am very happy with 3ware controllers because of their extensive support in Linux. For the most part we’ve standardized our office on 3ware for our RAID controller needs.

INSTALL CPANEL
Now things are starting to get interesting. According to the CPanel’s website they completely support 64-bit CentOS 4.1. Right...

FAIL
Support and work-out-of-the-box are two completely different things. It turns out there are a number of issues between dependences which cause specific pages from working in 64-bit. The only solution at this point is to remove the RPM’s which conflict and move on without them. The simple fix worked and we’re back in business. The RPM which conflicts was something which we didn’t need anyway… Stupid eh?

TESTING
Now that we have it up and running everything seems extremely quick! We’ve added a group of test domains to the server to get an idea how it will hold up on a mild load. Everything seems to work perfectly. We’ve used only small personal sites to test, but for the most part everything has been smooth sailing once we fixed the 64-bit RPM issue.

SUMMARY
It’s my opinion that Linux + 64-bit is here. Obviously some software has some catching up to do, but for a most the simple tasks a Linux server does 64-bit is a viable solution. With the prices on AMD64 chips fairly low it makes a great value server. I would recommend one of these chips to anyone looking for a high performance server, but unable to afford the traditional Xeon-class chips.