Caldera, RedHat, Slackware: Choices and Consultation Help needed

[dwacks@interactcommerce.com]

Hi,

I am investigating rebuilding the web servers and would like your opinions.
The system would support Apache, PHP3/4, MySQL (access MS-SQL), Mail,
mailing lists, and have some redundancy built in (clustering/mirroring/etc).
If you have knowledge or have done this, I  would like some input on the
following areas:

1. Which O/S would be the "best" to operate this environment. We are using
Red Hat 6.1 but find it flaky in several areas. I personally have used other
slack ware and FreeBSD/Debian however these seem to be seen as toys and not
commercial o/s. I am currently researching Caldera's e-server and e-desktop.

 1a. Has anyone used the Caldera system?
 1b. What do you see as being better/worse about it?

2. Once the O/S is selected, how should redundancy be set up? The goal is
that if a system drops, another will take over. We have load balancing
switches and used Compaq clustering solution. A secondary requirement is
that we only want to update the data once (whether it is a SQL entry or a
web page).  A couple of ways I thought about doing this include:

a. several Linux web servers (WS) hitting an NFS machine. The NFS server has
all of the web sites and SQL tables. The WS would access the same data. The
load balancing switch would deliver the incoming IP over several boxes. If a
box is down, it would bypass it.  

I am not sure how virtual hosting would like this scenario. Also, it
introduces a single point of failure to the NFS box. We may be able to use a
RAID system that is shared among the boxes.

b. We have one main server that is MIRRORED across several other servers.
The load switch would monitor the connection and if it dropped, it would
shunt to another box.

I sort of like the first solution as it gives the most flexibility.

3. We are trying to settle on an official decision for:
a. Mail (Sendmail or qmail)  requires pop3/ security
b. Mailing lists (majordomo/mailman)
c. search engine (needs to be able to handle thousands of pages and filter.


Have any of you done this? What were the results? What would you recommend?

(sorry for the length of the message. I wanted to ensure there was enough
background to properly give you the environment).

Thank you,
Dave
________________________________________________________________
David C.Z. Wacks
Website Manager
Interact Commerce Corporation

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dwacks@interactcommerce.com