-=> Rick Christian wrote to Barry Davis Jr <=-

 RC> When you say "server" what is YOUR use of this server?

Now that is probably the most important question! :-)

I'm one who often does not go down the normal LAMP road - web services are
generally secondary for my servers.  For example, the machines currently
running as servers are:

CentOS VPS (a hangover from when some software was written for RH distros) -
primary function is to support various radio over IP networks - some analogue,
some digital for ham radio use.  There is a web server, mostly to support
various status pages and one or two small websites.  Not a full LAMP stack,
MySQL is not needed, but PHP is used.

Audio server - Debian.  This machine records a local community radio station at
scheduled times.  The recordings are made available for me to download over
SFTP, so I can edit, compress and upload them to various podcast sites for the
programs.

BBSs (x2) - Raspian - These are my BBS machines. ;)  One of the BBS machines
also runs a digital radio over IP gateway (no radios hooked up yet).

IRLP node - Debian.  This is an analogue radio over IP gateway.

VPN endpoint - CentOS - another older machine that was repurposed to become an
OpenVPN endpoint.  This is used to route public IPv4 addresses to the BBSs.

There's also a couple of other Pi boards configured for radio over IP work
running Raspian.

So yes, the question of what the server is to do is important.

As for distros, I now prefer Debian based, and Debian is usually my first
distro of choice.  As for the others:

Raspian - first choice for the R-Pi and similar ARM boards, feels just like
Debian.

Ubuntu - honestly, I haven't really used it, but hear mostly good things.

Mint - never used, but has a lot of good reports.

Fedora - Designed for RHEL development/testing.  Has a very fast release cycle
as a result, not something I'd use for a server with a lifetime of more than a
year, unless you like frequent reinstallations. 

RHEL/CentOS - If you must have a Red Hat based distro, these are your best bet.
 YUM can be a pain at times, but these are mostly solid.  Sometimes there are
major changes between releases that might break software after a server
upgrade.  Test before upgrading! :)

SuSE - tried it, didn't like it, the only YUM/RPM based distos I could work
with were CentOS or Fedora.  

I certainly prefer APT over YUM.


... It's innocence when it charms us, ignorance when it doesn't.
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