mkswap harakiri! lol
 

Ok, I'm no expert, but this can't be good:

Being a newbie, I had no idea what I was doing. I now realize that I completely killed my system, since that was the only disk!
It's still up and running since most of it was in memory. Is there any way to fix this or is my system dead for all eternity?

To the best of my knowledge mkswap does a very thorough
format by default, one with bad-sector check... maybe some
commercial tool can recover from it, but I don't think you'll
be lucky with anything that came with your distro.


Cheers,
Tink

ouch! lol
Glad I've got a full backup then, but it'll take me forever to upload 10GB to that server! :D
Thanks, Tink. I'll be more careful from now on.

Now that I have to ask for a reinstallation from my host, any recommendations for a distribution to run a minimalistic web server on a 500MHz/96MB/20GB server? I had debian until half an hour ago, ;) is there any significant difference between the distros or are they pretty much the same?


Damn this sucks, I've got 1500 hits a day on that site, lol.

Glad you're not taking it TOO badly :}


In terms of "which distro"
Depends on what you're after, really ...

If easy maintenance and quick, well-tested upgrade
strategies is what you're after, stick with deb ... other
than that all distros will do the same things, some with
more secure and less chubby defaults than others.

debian is a good choice, personally I'd always go
with slackware ;} but wouldn't recommend it if you're
not a control-freak and need to know what's going on
on the machine in detail. With the hardware spex you
mentioned, and if you're not too eager to do a lot of
stripping down manually I'd stay clear of the so-called
user friendly bug contenders like RH, FC, MDK or SuSE,
their defaults suck :} in terms of performance and security
settings .. ["friendly" is not an option on a server ;}]


Cheers,
Tink

Na, in order to keep calm, one's gotta laugh at stuff like this. No need to get excited, it won't change anything. ;)
I prefer to compile stuff on my own, but libraries and small apps may still come in packages. Perhaps slack would be better than deb then. Slack's got packages, right? "apt-get install " is just so damn simple.
And ok, I will stay away from the "get everything running in three clicks" distros ;)

It comes with what I consider a pretty down-to-earth
collection of necessary things, and a few cherries
on top. There's a reason Slack is still delivered on
two CDs, if you don't need KDE and Gnome CD1 will
do ... apache, PHP and MySQL are part of the distro,
if that's what was on your server. Have a look at
http://www.slackware.com/getslack and browse through
the pre-fabbed packages Pat provides. If it's not
there than you have two choices a) compile from source
or b) try to find it on http://www.linuxpackages.net ...
My personal preference is source ;}
One note on Slacks package management: it doesn't
do ANY dependency checking (I consider that a benefit,
others will whine).



Cheers,
Tink