I remember 15yrs ago or so Gentoo was pretty much our only choice modern enough that we could run on our mixed farm of Solaris(SPARC) and HP G5/G6 (x86).
We used those because they were cheap to buy used back then.
The overlay system was also a pretty big bonus. So easy to set up custom overlay and just pull freeradius from git, apply our custom patches and deploy it in the overlay. By deploy I mean archive the source code + some metadata files. Then boot up a machine and configure portage to know about our overlay and then just install the entire suite of apps we needed.
Things have evolved a lot I have to admit. These days you just have artifactory or ECR and just push and pull your custom container images from there and boom .. custom software up and running.
The overlay system was also a pretty big bonus. So easy to set up custom overlay and just pull freeradius from git, apply our custom patches and deploy it in the overlay. By deploy I mean archive the source code + some metadata files. Then boot up a machine and configure portage to know about our overlay and then just install the entire suite of apps we needed.
Things have evolved a lot I have to admit. These days you just have artifactory or ECR and just push and pull your custom container images from there and boom .. custom software up and running.