Hello,
We just ordered a Dell PowerEdge 1800 Server, with an Intel Xeon 2.8GHz, 2GB DDR2 Memory, 80GB SATA HD. (I wanted a SCSI, but it was out of my budget at the moment )

We need to configure it to run one website with about 5,000 visitors daily and 1.5GB average traffic daily. Need the basics for the web server, Apache, PHP, MySQL, Postfix, MailScanner/SpamAssasin (for the email), AWstats, etc. It also runs a heavily used vBulletin board. The DB for that board alone is more than 1GB.

We probably will be using the latest Fedora distro, but I was wondering if there is a better choice to install in this server (I was also thinking on the latest Suse 10)

All suggestions and comments are welcome…

Thanks....

Welcome to LQ!

There is no better, more customizable, standard distro than Slackware.

I would use what ever distro you know best. Least chance for downtime and if that does occur, you will be able to resolve the issue quicker because of experience with it. I personally would use debian but only because I use that and gentoo quite often. This server sounds like a production machine, not a server for you to learn a new distro with.

A couple of other considerations. Be sure you get a SATA drive that uses NCQ and an
Intel board that supports AHCI.
http://linux.yyz.us/sata/sata-status.html

Thanks everyone for the replies...

Here are the full details of the server I ordered:

- 2.8GHz/2MB Cache, Xeon 800MHz Front Side Bus for PowerEdge 1800
- 2GB DDR2 400MHz (4X512MB) Single Ranked DIMMs
- 80GB 7.2K SATA HDD, PE1800
- On board Network Adapter
- 48X IDE CD-ROM
- Motherboard SATA, PE1800
- Tower Chassis, PE1800
- Non-Redundant Power Supply PE1800
- Type 3 Contract - Next Business Day Parts and Labor On-Site Response Initial Year
- Type 3 Contract - Next Business Day Parts and Labor On-Site Response 2YR Extended

any other sugestions are welcome

As a personal thing I would recomend either fendora because lots of servers use it on the other hand sanity is not statistical. Gentoo is quite good as you can get exacaly what you want, it's easy to update and it's optimized.

Reading different sites I came across this distro named CentOS. It said is based entirely on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Considering that I'm using this server as a production machine with heavy traffic, would this RHEL based distro be better option for stability than using Fedora?

Here are some links of reviews of CentOS:
http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/5823/1/
http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/5687/1/
http://distrocenter.linux.com/articl.../05/03/1548207

Fedora continually undergoes development and updates even after a major release so this may not make it so attractive to use on a mission critical server. RHEL is tested and stabilised over a long period of time, so it could be a better option than Fedora. Since CentOS is based on RHEL, the pros and cons of RHEL will apply to it as well. Saying that I know some hosting providers that use both Fedora Core and CentOS.

Thanks for the reply everyone... anyone else have any comments?

I've actually had less problems out of my production fedora core than out of the rhel and the centos builds. No one was more surprised than I was, as I tried several different distros for this box because it would be hit VERY hard(feeds deployments, software updates, upgrades, patches, a web server, etc.). The RHEL needed frequent reboots as it would just lose memory and eventually lock up. I rebuilt twice just to be sure. I was a bit disappointed, as I really wanted some of the features of RHEL, but you can add these into fedora. I'm going to try a suse ent version this next week, bringing up the spare on it and testing it for a week or so. BTW, over 3 days this box has pushed 75.9 gigs out, most of it in very short bursts.

I'll be happy to see the new raid adapter come in Tuesday, that should help a bit....but overall I'm very pleased with it's performance.

You should compare distros at www.distrowatch.com.

Whenever, I want to research a distro that is where I go because you can search the listings by distro type and then do a side by side comparison which will show you the various packages bundled into the distribution.

If I were to recommend one to you it would be tinysofa

http://classic.tinysofa.org/

its a Dell server right? Dell will preinstall RHE for you or win2k3, as you are wanting linux, smart move, then let them install RHE. you know every bit of hardware will work and you will have zero hardware problems this way.

i have had both Whitebox and CentOS as web and e-mail servers, they work great.

as someone above stated though, use the distro that you are most comfortable with and know the best. that way you will spend less time learning how other distros do things then the way you are familiar with.

one distro i have not seen mentioned that is very robust and used for a lot of servers due to its slow to change and when it does change/upgrade the changes/upgrades just work is Debian.

if you are already comfortable with FC, then try CentOS as you are already used to the way it works.

The server comes with no OS installed. They offer to install Windows Server or RHEL. But it cost extra... a lot extra which I can't afford at the moment. RHEL starts from $899 up to $2,699 on Dell Systems. That’s why I think I'll use CentOS, since they offer their systems with RHEL, and CentOS is based on that source, I think it will work better.

Thanks

either way good luck.