Heya. I'm gonna set up a server for the following uses:

-SMB File Sharing + Backup
-Half Life Server
-Teamspeak Server
-Maybe DHCP/Router
-GCC Compiling cause I write some big ass programs
-Some Apache hosting (I know apache like the back of my hand)

Which distro would you reccomend? I have a Windows Server 2003 Enterprise CD that I might use just to learn it, but I'm really loving Linux so much I'm not sure if I wanna go back

So what distro would you reccomend? I'm willing to try slack or debian if it's really gonna be a speed boost, but I know a lot of professionals that use Red Hat.

And don't say Mandrake......I wanna try a new distro And if a *BSD system would work better, go ahead and reccomend that.

Oh, this sytem is gonna be a 1GHz dell box with 256MB or ram that I have lying around. It's gonna get shoved in a corner and be remotely managed......on a dual OC48 at my school

Oh, one other thing......

What else would be useful to use a server sitting in a corner for?? I really want to try our a bunch of stuff with this box so what can I serve?

How nice it would be to have "junk" like that lying around

As for a distro, maybe start with something like:
http://smoothwall.org/

Or:
http://gentoo.org/
And go from there. That way you can sorta pick and choose what you want. The nice-ity about smoothwall is you will be starting out with something slightly more secure and going from there; something that should be considered when 'dinkin' with a server.

Or you could go with what all your IT geeks are using, Redhat is commonly referred to in How-To's, has many tools, gives support, and is widely used because of all this. It wouldn't be a bad choice, but if you want to break away from the RPM thing (mandrake) then maybe http://archlinux.org http://gentoo.org http://slackware.com or http://debian.org might be worth a shot.

Cool

Sweet. Thanks again dude!! And btw, when I get my next paycheck, you guys are getting a big donation

Anyways, get some sleep (I'm in EST-USA btw) and I'll be running this box in a week or two.

So what else should I run on it for fun???

I didn't see any mention of a mail server? You could give Postfix a go.

FTP, DNS, and Bittorrent.

I'm PST-USA, at work I'm the night tech in the pharmacy here. What a job eh? 9000 posts later...

You could run an rsync/mirror for something, maybe the kernel or something.



Have fun! Good Luck! And let us know how it goes.

Cool

Definitely FTP. What would be the purposes of having a DNS server though?

BTW. I'm not currently planning on using a router for this so it's going to be on the Vandy network using their DNS and DHCP servers.

So why should I run DNS? And what does bittorent do?

Back to trying to sleep........

And on the eighth day, God made sleep. And it RULED.

Sleep definitely rocks!



For you, just to learn/tinker with. Get a bit of hands on with the DNS thing, also you could probably do some manipulation within your LAN and play some jokes on your buddies (make something like microsoft.com resolve to an internal IP and do whatever you want from there ).

Bittorrent is, well, for lack of a better term, file-sharing. You should check out their site for better explaination though:
http://freshmeat.net/redir/bittorren.../download.html

Get some sleep, I've got a few more hours here, then I'll be down for the count too. Til tomorrow night anyway

Cool