server
 

i was wondering how to get a server up and running on my old computer with mandrake 9.1. should i use this or should i get another distro???

mandrake will work fine, however it is a bit bloated for server work i would suggest slackware or debian, or, if you want to learn a lot about linux gentoo would work great too, i cant tell if the beginning of your post is also a question, if you want more than just an opinion on which distro then please be more specific if not then i hope this can help you