What do you think is the best simple and secure distro for turning the box into a NAS (Network Attached Storage) but can also have an Apache2 with PHP5 & MySQL and ProFTPD service?

Sorry to have bothered. I know how people tire of these questions.

Try looking at specialized distributions like SME Server and OpenFiler - they offer easy NAS with FTP support. Once you add dynamic Web site stuff then the system becomes more complex to secure and maintain (which is not really desirable in a NAS!) .

You may also want to consider virtualization solutions - if you need AMP for development then running the server as a virtual machine on your laptop may actually be a better approach than hosting test sites on the file server.

Good security point -- very much like not running extraneous services on a perimeter firewall.

Interesting suggestion about VM's.

Some followup Q's:

1. What VM software/system do you recommend for Lin on Lin? (No Win involved) Especially:
   • Is Xen mature enough?
   • Is Xen easy enough?
2. What distro would you use as your host OS . . .
   • for Xen?
   • for VMserver?
   • for something else?

I am just beginning on the quest to master VM-ing, so forgive any naivté in my Q's. My impression is that VMware, esp. VMserver, & Xen are the 2 viable choices.

My primary goal is easy switching between OS's (distros) being demonstrated/test-driven, the extra layer of security is a nice bonus.

That's a good analogy. My thought was that the NAS is also like a router/firewall in that downtime is not really acceptable: it has to work, or the network is effectively "broken" until it's available again.

WRT to virtualization, VMware is mature and very effective technology - I've used VMware for Linux guests on Linux hosts for years for distribution testing. It's ability to easily simulate a network is also essential for work that I'm currently doing. On a Centrino laptop the performance is very good.

The only practical weakness of VMware comes from the proprietary kernel modules: you are reliant on VMware to provide kernel modules that work on your host. VMware support Ubuntu, but don't officially support Fedora or Debian hosts, so users of those distributions have to use unofficial patches that a VMware developer provides. You don't need to add the "VMware Tools" to the guests, so that is less of an issue.

QEMU is a free and open source VM that provides all of the basic functionality that you would get from VMware (WS and Server) and is in the standard package repositories, The UI is rather primitive, and doesn't have some of the advanced features of VMware. It also currently requires a proprietary kernel module for acceptable performance, and the combination of these factors has killed my interest in it ATM, especially as VMware Server is free.

If the KVM module goes into the kernel then it might improve the situation a bit:

http://kvm.sourceforge.net/

Xen is like Linux on the desktop - it keeps getting better, but is never quite there . Red Hat were right to say earlier in the year that it wasn't mature enough for enterprise use, and I'll be very interested to see what they have been able to do with it for RHEL 5. I've got ISOs for FC6, but haven't had the time to look yet...

On balance I would definitely use Vmware Workstation for testing, and would probably use VMware Server, at least until solid Xen support is there for the distros that I would use for hosts and guests.

Thanks for the informative response.

So, VMserver it is (for the moment).

Then the Q is: "Which flavor of Debian -- Sarge, Etch, SimplyMEPIS 6, Kubuntu 6.06 LTS, Xubuntu 6.06 LTS, or Ubuntu 6.06 LTS?" The criteria are compatibility w/ VMserver & interface familiarity. My 1st tendency would be to use KDE, & will unless I am persuaded that a light weight WM will substantially reduce the RAM allocation to the host OS. I intend to install the host distro & use it only as a host -- all real "work" will take place in guest VM's.

I have done Sarge installs before, & I am sure I could muddle through another. So ease of installation is not an issue. Is there anything else to recommend Etch over Sarge? I am especially concerned about stability.

I think I could be happy w/ SimplyMEPIS 6, even using a WM. My current working box is SimplyMEPIS 3.3.2 & I plan to give SimplyMEPIS 6 a strong try in a VM on the new hardware.

I would prefer to avoid the *buntus for the moment, because I disagree w/ the sudo method of administration. (Yes, I know there is a simple fix). I assume that I can, if necessary, get the VMserver compatibility from Ku- or Xu-, I really don't want to have to learn Gnome. (Again, my personal prejudice.)

I opted for the Server edition of Ubuntu LTS as the Vmware Server host. This is the version of Ubuntu without any graphical environment. The main reasons were the leaness of it, and the issue of having to recompile the proprietary kernel modules every time the kernel version changes - Ubuntu LTS is now frozen (barring updates), and VMware test against it. If I used mainline Debian I would have either had to choose either the aging stable, or the still moving Etch/testing, neither of which VMware test against. I still use Debian on my public Web server because the versions matter less there.

WRT sudo, I'd suggest researching the issue a little further - there still seems to be a fair amount of misunderstanding amoung admins about what sudo actually does, and the practical benefits that it provides. The root account is an acknowledged design flaw of UNIX, and sudo is essentially the best fix that we have.

Forgott3n`, I hope your Q is adequately answered, we seem to have hijacked your thread ...

hob, That's the 1st reasonable defense of the "sudo system" that I have seen, do have any links where I might learn more?

As to host distro choice, I think I've gotten used to the eye-ease of Konsole & X-terms in general, Is there something lighter than Xfce that could be added to Ubuntu LTS Server?

The alternative would be to prune SimplyMEPIS 6, which is probably a silly idea; because the whole point of it is the KDE desktop customization, which would be the 1st thing to go.

On sudo: Unfortunately I don't know of any page that concisely lays out all the issues. My own understanding has been assembled piecemeal from practical experience, discussions etc. FWIW, some of the UNIX team still actively work on the successor to UNIX, called "Plan 9", and you can see their later ideas showcased there.

On light-weight window managers: the Ubuntu "universe" archive is a copy of the Debian repository, so you can get pretty much anything from there. You can see a complete set of the package indexes at packages.ubuntu.com. The light-weight WM that I know is Fluxbox, and Ubuntu definitely has packages for that.