I have an cable connection (256kbps) and i was thinking to buy a .ro domain (i'm from romania) and hosting an website and mail server on my machine.
For start i have to choose the distro and the mta and here i would like some suggestion from someone not new to this.
Distro:
RH9:
pro: stable, good support from other users
con: discontinued (no update support form redhat if i'm not wrong)
Fedora
pro: updates, good support (much like rh9)
con: rather unstable
WhiteBox EL
pro: based on RHES 3 srpm's
con: small vendor
MDK9.2
SuSE9

MTA:
Sendmail
pro: default mta on most distro's, maturity
con: poor security history (just like windows )
Postfix
pro: high security
con: less documentation
qmail
same as postfix

I really would appreciate on what combination to choose and the arguments that sustains it.

That will be just the first step in accomplish my goal. The next one will be to actually setup the web server and the mail server. This is the part where i really need a lot of help, especially on mail server .

Debian and exim would be my choice. Debian is extremely well suited for being a server as it is very easy to keep it up to date and to apply fixes, and the community is very big. exim has never caused me much trouble either and it is stable and secure.


Håkan