icebrian

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Hello everyone.

Once again I revert to the knowledge and wisdow of these forums.

I the near future I shall be building a new HA (high availability) cluster to serve webpages. The cluster will consist of two computers, one P4 1.7 w 1GB RAM (which will act as the main server) and one PIII 1Ghz w 1GB RAM (which will act as the failsafe server).

Now the reason to which I revert to these forums.

For every server I have ever built I have been using Slackware. It is without a doubt a great distro which I have come to know very well. However I have been considering trying out a BSD flavour due to various reasons, among them the robust network services.

I would like to ask everyone what in your opinion would you choose to build a new server, Slackware, FreeBSD or NetBSD? And why choose one over the other?

I want to acheive an end result of an extremely secure and stable server. I require security updates to be released in a timely manner. Ideally some sort of package management such as FreeBSD's port's is a plus but not absolutely necessary.

The server will also only have the required packages. What I mean is, I shall not be installing such things as X.

I look forward to all opinions.

Regards,
icebrian

Alien Bob

My completely biased opinion would be of course, to use Slackware.

Eric

swampdog2002

I would also recommend Slackware for these purposes, although I would imagine that any of these three distributions would offer what you need, with the required security and stability to boot. Are you familiar with the BSD distributions at all? I briefly used FreeBSD for a time, and some of the syntax for commands is different. If you are not, I would stick with what you are already familiar with and use Slackware.

icebrian

Thanks for the replies, even thou 'biased'

I understand how slackware has two votes, but isn't FreeBSD or NetBSD more Network related? Or best suited for networking tasks?

Can anyone of you actually say why slackware is your main choice, besides being already familiar with it, or the fact that things are a little different on BSD flavour's.

Is FreeBSD in fact better for networking tasks than Slackware? Which is considered to be safer/securer or stabler?

jlliagre

You'll probably get more (and differently biased ) votes by asking for this thread to be moved to the *BSD forum.

reddazz

I think you should take all three operating systems for a spin and see which works out best for you. The only reason why I'd pick FreeBSD or NetBSD over Slack is because I am not particularly a fan of Slackwares packaging tools.

apolinsky

If you are thinking of a bsd flavor, I've always gravitated to freebsd. My ISP uses it. I have 6.3 running on a vmware machine with no problems. I have always been a bit disconcerted with some of the differences between it, and Linux however. Partitioning, installing packages, compiling ports for installation gets a bit tedious. Slackware seems to me to be the better choice.

icebrian

Thanks everyone for your replies.

I guess ill probably just try out a BSD flavour first, may-be start off with FreeBSD see how it goes.

Thanks again.

Regards

XavierP

As per request, moved to *BSD for non Linux opinions