Where exactly do I get a Linux server? I know this is a stupid question, but it's really confusing me.

From what I'm understanding, any Linux OS can be your server OS, it just needs stuff like LAMP and Bind. Is that correct?

I'm about to get Fedora 10. Can I make a server out of it?

Thanks.

As you observed, you *can* but you shouldn't. Fedora is made for developers to mess around with, try things out... break stuff. It's not good for a server by design. The closest *free* relative is CentOS which is a rebrand of Redhat Enterprise. http://centos.org

Yes, theoretically almost any linux distro could run as a server. In practice though, some are more suitable for this task then others. Some popular choices for servers are Centos or Debian (They tend to have older versions of packages, which means that they've been extensively tested and therefore are usually more stable)

I take it by you second para that you do not mean "to what company do I go to get them to supply a collection of hardware and software that acts as a server, either co-lo or supplied to my premises". So you just mean server software that you can install, no?

You also do not mean "where do I get, eg, a DNS/NFS/Squid/Samba/DHCP server process to run alongside various other on my system"?

Really, any Linux distro could be the distro that you use as a server, some will be more suitable than others. If you need support, you should go for something for which support is a possibility, whether from the supplier or a third party. If you want your system to be secure in the medium or long term, you will want to go with something for which bug fixes are available in the medium or long term - desktop systems are often off the 'bug fixes list' after a shockingly short period of time, and once the system is off that bug fixes list your only secure option is to 'upgrade' to something that is still on the big fixes list.

This would be a real pain, if you had spent some time configuring and testing the system to work the first time as you may have to spend a related amount of time configuring and testing again (and, of course, if this box is providing 'mission critical' services, you have to have a spare set of hardware that you can use for build and test purposes while the old hardware is still running or do all of the work out of service hours).

And, of course, if security is a priority, you would only want to install applications which have a chance of being secure, and so you would not want the typical desktop situation of installing some miscellaneous bucketful of applications, just because the group that put together the install script hadn't a clue that you might not want it all. I suppose you could accept the bucketful and the de-install the ones that you don't need, but that seems like a poor approach and asking for you to create either dependency problems or orphan libraries/packages. (And you really wouldn't want a GUI, because even the simpler general purpose GUIs are large complex things and with complexity comes bugs and bugs was what you didn't want, right?)

So, after you filter out all of the desktop systems that have one drawback or the other, you'll probably just be left with 'the traditional server distributions' and maybe one or two others that could be used in a pinch as many of the popular desktop distributions will have disadvantages.

And then if you have server hardware - say a 3ware raid card, or an Intel Multiport Gigabit Network adaptor or something, the kind of thing that it would be very reasonable to have in a server - you'll probably find that some support software is only certified to work with the big few enterprise distros. Now you may be able to get around this, but would you really be well advised to go down that route?

Of course, if this was only a home server, you might be well placed to avoid exotic hardware, so that last para may not apply to you.