I'm downloading the FreeNAS iso right now so I can play with it on my VM.

I was wondering if anyone could tell me some pros and cons / likes or dislikes regarding this distro. I've never heard anything about it. From what I've read it sounds like something I'd like to try.

I've been using Debian for a while, but I want to try something new. I've got a server right now running Debian 6.05, and it is absolutely great. However I want to reconfigure the server and i figure what better time to try a new distro. I use this server as a learning tool while I am in school. It really helps me learn by trying different OSs here and there on the server it self. VMs only work so well in helping me learn.

I was hoping someone could suggest a few other good Linux flavors for me too look into other than FreeNAS.(I'm not too interested in Ubuntu or Fedora so any other suggestions would be great.)

To help with the suggestions here are some things I will be using this server for.

LDAP sever, DHCP server, file server. I'd like something that has really good LDAP tools, and great logging. Of course almost all distros will have features like this, some Linux distributions have more or les features and focus on specific things.

Such as Smoothwall. Smoothwall's logging is incredible if you haven't tried it out.

Thanks!

FreeNAS isn't strictly speaking a "distro". It's a specialized package designed specifically for implementing an NAS server. Nor is it Linux, but is based on FreeBSD. It works well for its intended purpose, and is not very resource hungry.

My preferences for server OSes (in no particular order) are : Slackware, Debian, CentOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD

It may be one of the best NAS type solutions around. It has some very advanced features that even I don't know how to use. It is stable and every bit as good as commercial products. The only competition that I know of is Openfiler.

If you want, you can add all those features to almost any distro.

The only downside might be speed. Some hardware based nas devices would or could outperform a totally software based device.

There is a learning curve as with all choices.