[NTLUG:Discuss] Which Server Distro?

[Robert Citek]

On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 9:10 AM, Michael Barnes <barnmichael at gmail.com> wrote:
> I need to build up a couple of basic servers, primarily for ftp use, a
> few small web pages and a handful of small bash and perl scripts. No
> DNS, DHCP, SMTP, Samba or other complicated stuff.  These are no
> budget enterprise machines, the ftp boxes see around 3 GB of transfer
> daily.

If these are really servers (no desktop) only running ftp, apache, and
bash/perl (plus probably sshd?), just about anything will do as those
pieces are pretty solid, don't change much, and pretty consistent
across distros.  Plus your demands seem pretty light: 3 GB /day ~ 35
KB/s.  So you may want to go with what will run on your hardware and
with what you are familiar.

Debian, CentOS, OpenSUSE, Ubuntu: all good.  If you go with Ubuntu,
you will probably want to pick an LTS (8.04 seems your best bet as
6.04 is getting dated and 10.04 is not out yet.)

> BTW, new hardware is a bunch of used Dell 2850 servers.  I don't know
> yet how much memory, but they have five Seagate SCSI drives of unknown
> size.  I do know the drives are U320 series.

I've had good experiences with Red Hat and CentOS on Dell hardware.

Good luck and let us know how things go.

Regards,
- Robert