All I can say is: go with Debian. I know you have experience with it, it's solid and not full of crap like some other distros I know. SuSE is too graphical, which is not needed when you've got a server, and CentOS is pretty similar, too.

As for setup... SSHD is pretty painless (just setup the daemon to start automatically, and you're fine). FTPD is fine, although I do have to point out that SFTP is easier to setup (nothing, it's the same as SSH ), but FTPD doesn't require much configuration either. I've never used Webmin, so I can't really advise you on that one.

Apache is the only one you might have problems setting up. Just make sure to follow Apache's documentation for the httpd.conf file, and read the much-commented lines. You'll basically want a virtual host directive pointing to a main /var/www directory for the homepage, and then additional virtual host directives for each individual user (which will of course, have to be added manually). You can then link to these from the home page.

Good luck!

the best advice for choosing a distro I've ever heard sounded something like "choose the distro best known by the closest *NIX guru to you".

Actually there are good sites like howtoforge.com and rocksproject.org that would guide you through setting up several different server types fitting your purpose. Since all distros are slightly different, setting up daemons is different as well. In Debian webmin, FTP and SSHd can be installed by apt-get, in CentOS yum is your friend, but it doesn't include webmin (you have to download the RPM from webmin.com).
In any case, whatever distro you choose, solutions are available in abundance

yeah this is fairly new to me (ive only ever used samba and nfs before)

i hate suse too i was just throwing ideas about

debians apt-get is good, i like that alot but i think ill go with CentOS as i like its graphical utilities for configuring services, firewall, apache, ftp etc... as well as the long release cycle

Also, how can i set up local DNS? I want to be able to go to http://server.local or something instead of to its IP

http://www.djbdnsrocks.org/

Webmin has a pretty good GUI for BIND dns

well ive installed centos and got Apache 1 and VsFTPd working but im having a but of trouble with IP's. I need DHCP as my PDA cant do static and i need it to have wifi access

yum install dhcpd
the rest is very easy to configure in webmin

seems to be working fine
installed webmin etc

went and baught a networking book (FC1 but suitable for centos 4.4)

gonna play with mail server now get local lan mail set up

I'd optimise the server first - remove unneeded stuff, recompile the kernel etc.

Why in the world did you install Apache 1? Apache 2 is superior to version 1 in nearly all ways - there's no reason to use old outdated software.

I disagree. Get your main services working first (DHCP, DNS, FTP, etc). Once that works the way you want it, and only then, reoptomize your server and remove the fluff.

If you have all sorts of problems, how in the world are you supposed to know where it's coming from? If you know that your services were working fine before, then you can trace it down to what you did last (for example, recompiling the kernel).