Mr O wrote:
> Otay, building file server here. Pick an OS, any OS. Who thinks what is best
> for dishing out all my music and files. Must have linux compatibility. Any
> *BSD or linux distro can and will be considered.
Well, about two weeks ago I made the decision to go with Debian
Potato.
First, my goals (which may not be yours):
I'm trying to assemble a piece of infrastructure -- once it's running,
I want it to run with very little maintenance. So far, it's lived up
to that.
The box's major functions are/will be:
X DNS server
X NTP server
X Database server: MySQL and PostgreSQL
X Folding@home client
X/2 MP3 repository/Jukebox/Icecast server
Photo repository and web server
FTP server, mirror
Weather station
staging WWW server (place to test changes to our public web sites)
Perforce repository
Mail server
Tall order, eh?* The "X"'s mark things that are functional now.
I also want to make regular backups of (parts of) it. Mostly the
digital photos once I start the photo repository.
Why Potato? Rumored to be stable. Abundant local expertise when I
have questions. Debian is new enough (to me) to be interesting.
So, Potato is stable. Yes, it is. I've run into several problems
where the software I want isn't part of Potato, but no problems where
Potato or its packages didn't work or didn't run correctly. Things
that weren't available for Potato, I built from source. I've only
rebooted the box once since I declared it in production (Jan. 3rd),
and that was to install a CD-ROM drive. Next reboot will probably be
to install another disk for MP3s.
I'll find out later whether major upgrades are seamless.
I'm still getting used to the Debian way of installing and upgrading
packages, but I'm getting more proficient there.
I also considered OpenBSD. But since this box is behind a firewall
and won't be exporting anything outside the house, security is less of
a priority. OpenBSD doesn't run the Linux Folding@home client. (-: It
also has less software available for it, even counting the ports
collection.
I also considered RedHat. The most recent RedHat would probably have
been serviceable.
I considered Mandrake 8.1, for about 20 seconds. (-: Fine desktop
distro, but a server???
* The box was also going to be a caching HTTP proxy, but that's now
running on the OpenBSD firewall. That works well, and the firewall
was underutilized.
--
Bob Miller K<bob>
kbobsoft software consulting
http://kbobsoft.com [EMAIL PROTECTED]
