I recently bought an old 500MHz(dual) server board and tried setting up windows, and server 2003, which neither would boot with windblows drivers, that don't seemto read the board. On the other hand, fedora, redhat server, ubuntu server all seem to work great. So since ubuntu server doesnt run NTFS partitions too well, adn i already have a compiled (windblows RAID) spanned hard drive setup. So i went with RedHat, also because it worked the best with an internal server raid, although im going to be using a card for the rest of the raid. For all my HDD's going into this raid after i finish the install

2x 250GB, 1xSATA1 and 1xPATA
1xPATA 300GB
1xPATA 180GB
1xSATA1.5 160GB
1xPATA 40GB (for the OS)

The 300, andtwo 250s, and the 160 are all on my RAID card, and the 180, and 40 are on the board. I'm most likely going to run all of them as a mirror, using half for actualy use, and half for backups.

Anyhow, anybody have a better recommendation for LINUX server, i can't use BSD i hate the interface, althoughruns great, i don't like it enough to run it, plus i need this to be able to let my winboxes access the fileserver easily with user accounts on the server in linux.

I'm all new to server OS's other than windows distros.

Just curious, which version of Red Hat are you thinking about using? As long as it supports the hardware, any version of Linux works fine for a server, since it'll just purr away in a corner somewhere. Are you planning on using the NTFS raid setup as-is? I wasn't aware that the Linux kernel could mount and read/write to pre-existing Windows raid volumes. Give it a shot and let us know how it goes. Make sure to install the SMP kernel, too

Debian is freaking great for a server. Secure as hell, easy to administer all around solid as steel.


If you want something really tight security wise try OpenBSD. It's not Linux, but UNIX. The BSD's actually have much better documentation than Linux. Solaris (another UNIX) is also well respected in the server arena but I don't have much experince with that one. If alpha sees this he may be able to shed mor elight on Solaris.

Im downloading Solaris, the redhat i had was old as mud the server/workstation install was all on one 700mb cd.

Anyhow the redhat install finished, and i got a constant error "hda: lost interupt"
so solaris here i come

I've used Solaris 10, it's not bad, fairly easy to set up and whatnot. It defaults to Gnome as a desktop, and it doesn't have the broad hardware support that Linux has, but the server stuff should be covered. I never got to really test it, as the spare computer had to be formatted to prototype a MythTV box... Let us know how it goes.