my friend is going to try to set up a server using linux but doesn't know what distro to use. Im not sure of the power or specs of the computers i just know they are older ones. (the towers are the old skool horizontal ones.) He also has little experience with linux but i can help him the best i can. Does anyone know of a good distro for the situation?

For old hardware:
Slackware or Debian

For ease of use:
Mandrake (which I personally wouldn't use)
SusE (requires a little more power)

SUSE Pro is a good choice, because it has a graphical management system and a fair amount of documentation. It also gets updates from the manufacturer for 2 years.

Installing Debian requires you to know how Linux works before you start, so I wouldn't recommend it as a first distribution.

I wouldn't use Mandrake either - after using it a year I became seriously unhappy about the amount of broken features and problems. It has a nice set of tools, but many of them didn't work reliably.

Personally I use Fedora Core and Red Hat, but many of the server features require you to edit configuration files so you have to learn how the software works.

Any distribution will work OK on a Pentium II or above, and network services actually use very little resources. You just have to be aware that the standard graphical desktops require at least 128Mb RAM to be happy.

Suse and Mandrake try to please everybody. For a server, you do not need or want a GUI etc. You can use webmin if you wish a GUI interface for configuration. Mandrake has one advantage over Slack on old hardware. If it is .586 or better, a server will run a little faster. The trick with a Mandrake server is to install nothing you do not want running. No office suites, no GUI, no unnecessary processes started at boot time. Use expert and package selection. Install apache, php, mysql and so forth, but omit anything related to X, GUIs and other higher-level apps.

Other ways to wring more speed from old hardware are more RAM and the choice of filesystem. You may want a journalling filesystem for reliability, but you can use RAID and a non-journalling filesystem like ext2 for readonly served data if there is a backup on a journalled filesystem or elsewhere. If you have lots of clients/many files being served simultaneously, try RAID 1. If you have few clients and large files, try RAID 0. The biggest speedup with RAID is going from one drive to two, nearly doubling in speed if drives are your limiting factor. A single 100 mb/s NIC can only use part of most drives' speed, but with gigabit/s, you can use all the speed your bus can handle. It is best to go with one drive per cable. You can add a PCI card to give you a few more. You can get cases with ten or more drive slots and LInux can use them all. 2.6.x kernel has some small speed advantage for a busy system, but it may be a little less stable than the 2.4.x kind.

One thing about old hardware: there is a lot of it. Many are gathering dust in closets. Most likely, you will be limited in your service by NICs. You may be able to provide service on multipleNICs to get more throughput, or add a gigabit/s NIC. Another approach is OpenMosix with MigSHM. You can find it on ClusterKNOPPIX, I believe. This allows two or more PCs to act as a bigger, nastier server or general purpose PC. It would be an advantage to have gigabit/s between the PCs in your cluster because then it would be quicker to share the load. OpenMosix shares the load between the CPUs of a cluster like magic. If your system is busy, this is very useful. MigSHM is an extension that permits apache processes to slide over from one machine to the next. The machines can all share the same processes, hard drives, memory. If your old machines are maxed out in RAM slots, this is a quick and dirty way to combine their power. Say you have four 128MB/400 MHz machines. They can form a self-balancing server as if it had 512MB and 1600 MHz and you can combine the outputs with a switch. You can get gigabit to 100Mb/s switches fairly cheaply these days, but a cheaper solution is to use multiple NICs if your customers can be split up.

RobertP,

It's worth considering that everything has a cost in time, and having to learn too much at once can be overwhelming.

I tried running servers with no graphical stuff at all, and just using Webmin. Webmin is a great tool, but you have to know what the options mean, so it doesn't help new administrators learning Linux as much as the graphical tools that do some things without requiring the user to know how the technology works. This reduces the need to learn as many things simultaneously. It was also surprising for me to learn that people with only Windows experience can be uncomfortable with systems where there is no graphical interface at all, because they have no points of reference.

Switching from Windows to Linux involves relearning a huge amount. To get to the point where someone is confident enough to manage clustering and RAID from the command-line takes lots of small steps - learning the shell, learning SSH, learning the Linux directory structure, learning what the partitions and filesystem types do...

Running old hardware (4 years+) means expecting component failures, so clustering, backup and RAID are fair concerns. On the other hand, for new users trying simple configurations buying newer hardware may be more cost and time-effective than trying to master more advanced UNIX kung fu before they are comfortable with the basics.

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bows before the master of the art of MOSIX, and sits down.
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