On May 19, 2005, at 3:11 PM, jon wrote:
> Well, the time has finally come -- as the office's long-time linux  
> desktop user, the responsibility of throwing together a new server  
> has fallen on my lap.
>
> The thing is, I have no idea what the cool server OS to use is  
> these days.
>
> Should I just go with Debian?
>
> I don't need the latest, greatest, kde packages or anything like  
> that -- I need something simple that'll do the job, LAMP-wise. I  
> want it to be easy to update and it's gotta run alright with a dual  
> opteron motherboard. It's also going to have some kind of RAID  
> support, so I need a distro that can handle that stuff.

I know a lot of people will hear "server" and steer you towards the  
enterprise Linux solutions like RH AS or CentOS or SuSE Enterprise...  
but honestly, any decent Linux distribution will be fine for your  
use.  You typically don't need to go the "enterprise" route unless  
you really do have enterprise-style needs.  For instance, if you are  
managing a cluster of a few hundred or thousand boxes all with  
multiple nodes of redundant fail-over or have a support contract with  
Oracle then yeah, you'll be wanting one of the hard-core distros.   
But for a simple LAMP box?

At work, all of our production servers run a version of RedHat AS3.   
That was chosen largely for it's ease of very large scale  
maintenance.  All of our development and test servers (and servers  
supporting development like CVS, file, mail, etc) all run Gentoo.

I'm a big fan of Gentoo.  However, if you have trouble exercising  
restraint, it's very easy to find yourself updating all the time and  
things will break LOTS in that case.  Not a good thing for a server.

Debian has much the same flexibility as Gentoo but with a lot better  
release testing.  I used to run some servers on Debian back in the  
day... but it's been awhile.

I also really like SuSE Professional for servers.  SuSE, it seems to  
me, often has the best "sane" defaults for everything.

In the end, though, I'd guess that most distributions would be more  
than capable of satisfying your needs.

Kurt

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