On Wed, 2003-09-03 at 10:23, Tom Munro Glass wrote: > Perhaps my question should have been "any hardware/distro combinations > recommended for a server?"
Well, generally you either go with whatever hardware is on hand, and potentially adjust your OS choice to go with the hardware constraints, or you go out and buy "the best" hardware from a supplier that you trust. Having a good relationship with the hardware supplier is essential, as there is a surprisingly high delayed-reject-rate in some common components. I've seen SCSI controllers work fine for a week, then start to crash ... As far as the distro goes, they all work :-) IMHO Linux is far more mature as a server than it is as a desktop, and I think most people here agree that it's not a bad desktop ... :-) Just adjust the choice to the potential audience. I guess you'd want to go with Gentoo if it were your box, which is fine ... It all depends on how much love and attention the server is going to get, and how stable an environment it lives in. I've run an old Intel desktop PC, P90 and 256Mb RAM with SCSI disks, as a server successfully over the last few years. If you don't ask it to do much, you don't need much! Too many people go charging off to get the fastest CPU, never realising that the server sits at 99% idle all day long ... Fast disks, on the other hand, are always a good investment ... and they will make up for a shortfall in RAM. -jim
