I was a linux admin, back in time, 6 or 7 years ago. Now i am a FreeBSD admin, using it with great success (for those that did not heard about FreeBSD, Yahoo uses it, also Hotmail used it before it was purchased by microsoft).

Everyhing is fine with FreeBSD, which is not much different from linux, still linux is more known and some people need linux setups, so coming back to linux my question to you is what is now the best linux distribution for Servers (web, mail, vpn, router - usages)?

I heard about CentOS, Whitebox which are descendants of RH9, also about Ubuntu, but I want to know your experience tips about what's best for servers.

thank you
ovidiu

Most of our servers that aren't running Solaris are running on RH Enterprise.
The rest run Debian.
That's a total of something like a hundred Linux servers.

I supose you are running Solaris on Sun RISC not on x86, right? I've heard that Solaris's strength comes from RISC processors too, not only from the OS itself, and performance is much better on RISC than on Intel compatibles CPUs.

Thanks for your answer!
best regards,
ovidiu

Personally, I wouldn't run Solaris on an x86 server. Redhat Enterprise is definately starting to shape up to a decent server OS. Debian is nice, but you won't find it on my server. Ubuntu is more for desktop end-user than it is for a server. If you can find a host that offers RHEL, there is no reason to stick with CentOS and Whitebox. If you can't, then I would use CentOS. CentOS is actually compiled from the SRPMS from the latest RHEL distrobution.

i like redhats GUI tools for configuring things

SuSE is buggy and is often thaught of as a dekstop OS but makes not a bad server i ahve found

i hate ubuntu for servers (sudo is a crap idea) but i love debian. I usually do a base netinstall then apt-get whatever i need so i can have a server up and running in no time at all

secondly, dont nececerially discredit windows for sevrers. I like linux but after trying server 03 i was very impressed although the GUI and well, windowsness may not suit all

If you are looking for a simple to install and maintain distribution, have a look at SMEserver.

www.smeserver.org

Tony

sles is a good choice, in my opinion. Ubuntu's lamp server is very useful. debian can run on anything, basicaly any of these distros are good.

i hate ubuntu server
sudo on a server is dumb it teaches bad practice

Why exactly is sudo so bad? It seems to me like the usual FUD people throw around with goto statements...

I've seen debates on other forums about sudo. The arguments against sudo is that on Ubuntu it allows a regular-privaleged user full access, and that user doesn't even need to use the root account. They say that that destroys the purpose of the root account.

The arguments for it is that you must manually type "sudo" in front of every command you want root access for. This, they say, is much safer than using "su" which then gives you full access to everything.

I understand both arguments, and the security method I tend to use is either one or the other -- but not both. Not sure how much good that does, though. :rolleyes: