I've been playing around and even using Linux for various tasks over the years, from running hi power workstations, to simple servers serving dedicated but important services. Everything I've learned and done is by doing simple research on the web.
I'm now given the task of setting up and configuring some servers to host some services such as mail, databases and web.
And after my initial research I've come to the conclusion that Ubuntu LTS or CentOS/Redhat would be well suited for server installations. Yes, I know that many would probably say that any distro would to, such as Fedora or OpenSuse. But what I'm looking for is a distro that I don't have to upgrade to a new version every 12 months.
In your experiences, what would to recommend Ubuntu LTS or the CentOS/Redhat route?

/Andy

Hello,

For production servers I always us Debian, it's fast, very stable, secure out of the box and easy to use and configure. If you're already familiar with apt-get and Debian I'd stick with that. I wouldn't even consider Ubuntu, but that's just my opinion. Only recently I started using RHEL on a daily basis at work so CentOS would also be a good choice.

At home in my playground I use Slackware and Calculate Linux for testing purposes, try outs and so on on servers. Both of them are very stable and secure but can be a bit harder to configure and maintain because of their differences with the other distros mentioned.

Kind regards,

Eric

1 members found this post helpful.

You hit the nail on the head. Some distros are designed to have the
latest and greatest versions of software. These are great for
workstations of power users that don't mind upgrading the OS fre-
quently. However, these are not a good fit for servers where you
want long term stability.

I generally go for Debian Stable, CentOS or Red Hat for servers.
If you like Ubuntu, go for the LTS version. OpenSuSE is another
one that is popular for servers.

You appear to be familiar with Ubuntu, CentOS and Red Hat, so
those would be good first choices. The next thing to consider
is support. If you want good support, buy Red Hat. I've had
very good experiences with Red Hat support. If you are comfort-
able with searching on the web, it's still a three way tie.

The tie breaker will be if you have any special requirements.
For example, do you need a particular version of some program?
A good example is php. Over the last couple of years newer
versions of php became available and Red Hat did not provide
the newer versions. There were third party repositories that
provided the newer versions, but these were not supported by
Red Hat. I'm not sure what Ubuntu does for LTS when a new
version of software is available. If it works like Debian,
you can select individual packages to install from testing
while everything else is from stable.

I'd definitely find a detailed list of what they want installed
on these servers before selecting an OS. And if they are
vague about what they want, any of these choices would be good.

Oh, I forgot to add that currently CentOS is at version 5
while Red Hat is at version 6. If you're setting up a
new environment and want to go with CentOS, you might
want to wait until version 6 is available. It will have
the newer versions of software, while version 5 has
versions from a couple of years ago.

Hi,

If you want to follow the RHEL path you could go with Scientific Linux which has a version 6 and is a RHEL clone. There are however messages popping up about the default repositories not being that good in means of connection, but you can just like in other RHEL clones, put in your own repos.

Kind regards,

Eric

1 members found this post helpful.

I was not really a Debian man until i asked a similar question to yours on another linux forum recently and got blasted for not mentioning Debian :P I always thought the big guns were Slackware, Gentoo and Red Hat...... apparently not. You really have to get into the system to appreciate Debain, but once you do you'll find stability security and reliability. Long story short, i now have great respect for Debian, however i still run Slackware on my server. Check this link below.

Cheers.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...distro-227530/

I currently run Ubuntu on two servers at home. I will say that I don't mind the application updates, especially in regards to security. One thing that I learned from Gentoo is that even though your primary application may have occasional security fixes, other underlying libraries have them more too and for this staying relatively current has some advantages. I do find the distribution upgrades every 6 months to be a problem. I have yet had one go without finding something doesn't work anymore and had to dig into fixing it. For this reason, I too would recommend staying away from Ubuntu.

At work, I have a server running on Slackware and it is just fine. Sometimes updating applications, such as Apache, can introduce issues depending on how you handle the configuration files. If you don't update the config files, updated applications may not work, but if you overwrite them you lose customizations, e.g. turn off PHP support in Apache which needs to be changed.

If you like Ubuntu, give Debian a try. Based upon what I have seen here, though, I would pay extra attention to the security releases and known exploits because it tends to be a little slower in releases than others. Consider subscribing to some security mail lists and watch places like threatpost for problems.