Which Redhat should I get?
 

Hi,
I went to redhat.com to get a copy but I am not sure which one is the right one.

I want to setup a web server and I am new to this. Any help you guys can provide as to what I need to set up a web server is greatly appreciated. Any tutorials, how-to's, pitfalls, ...

TIA.

Are you trying to setup a server for personal use or for an enterprise. AFAIK, you would have to pay for it if you want to go with Red Hat. If you are doing this for personal use, I suggest you go with any of the free distros available.

The best ones are (even for server)

www.opensuse.org
www.ubuntulinux.org
http://fedora.redhat.com
www.debian.org
www.slackware.com

The last two are more tweak-oriented (meaning you would have to tinker at first) and geared towards slightly advanced newbies but no doubt are rock solid. In the end, they are all linux distros so you should be fine if you chose any of them.

All of them come with Apache (http://apache.org) web server and it is relatively easy to setup. You can go to www.google.com/linux and search for apache related articles and how-tos. Come back here for specific questions...

Hope this helps,

Tux,

Edit: BTW, Fedora is a community based distro backed by Red Hat available free.

honest opinion: none! cost about 200$ probably
what i should say: get _any_ linux distro you prefer!

id recommend trying fedora core 4, which was created by Red Hat. its a great distro.

however, if you cant bear to wait and burn 4 cds, id highly suggest trying Ubuntu or SuSE.

or, search LQ.org for 'what distro should i use?' etc.. there will be literally hundreds of responses.

There is Fedora Core 4, which is a RedHat-supported community-developed distro that is updated at the cutting edge (has the newest stuff but may be unstable); it is much more updated than RHEL and has all the stuff that RHEL has and more.

If you want something like RHEL, consider CentOS, which is a rebuild of RHEL (it's identical to RHEL except it's free and has no RedHat logos).

If you want an RHEL alternative, then try CentOS. This is a rebuild of RHEL without the Redhat branding and proprietary apps.

Thank you very much for all the info.
I have started downloading Ubuntu and will try that.
My plan is to host more than one web site. Does this make it more complicated than hosting a single site?
I will be looking at some documents on apache.org to get started but if I know in advance what to expect it would make the experience a little less painful.

Thanks again for all your help.

Not really. Look for virtual hosts in apache documentation.

My plan is to host more than one web site. Does this make it more complicated than hosting a single site?

You probably have a single IP (mostly dynamic) address assigned to you by your ISP. You should get a dynamic domain from any of the dynamic DNS providers. The service is free and you can register upto 5 domain names (atleast with dyndns.com). The most popular is www.dyndns.com but there are others, which you can easily find using google.

Regarding multiple websites, I assume you have a single IP address so you would be using name-based virtual hosting...which is basically same ip address resolved for different domain names. This is then resolved to different web server directories that you have created. Each one would have their own content. This is easy to setup if you follow the how-tos and tutorials.

Once you have setup your website, you would then need to constantly watch out for ip address changes. If you dynamic dns entry goes stale, your website would be unreachable. This should be taken care off if you have one of those new routers with dyndns option. If not, then you can use ddclient which constantly watches out for ip-address change and updates your dyn dns record. This way your site is reachable almost all the time.

Very good tutorial worth checking out is www.linuxhomenetworking.com

Hope this helps,
Tux