[clug] Distro advice for server

[Tony and Robyn Lewis]

Chris Smart wrote:
> Here are some details that might affect the distro choice:
>  
> 1) It is a dual opteron machine with 8GB ram etc, h/w raid 6 controller
> (areca 1220 pci express) and lots of hdd space.. I want to run vserver on
> it, so that I can give virtual servers to various people. It has a tyan
> "lights out" card, but I think this is non-distro specific.
>
> 2) I want to run in 64bit, but be able execute 32bit if needed.
>
> 3) It will be mail / web / CMS / DNS / rsync / vserver / subversion etc type
> server.
>
> 4) I guess I want some sort of "hardened" type security on it, not sure if
> SELinux is the way to go (or perhaps RSBAC, grsecurity and PaX etc), nor how
> "easy" it is to configure on the various distros. (Do people bother with
> this sort of thing?)
>   

Chris, I reckon you'd find good success with Ubuntu.  We are doing 
almost exactly what you're doing - Ubuntu + vservers over LVM + RAID on 
an AMD64 box, running internet-y services.  Very happy with it, and it's 
in production.

Other niceties:
 * using apt-cacher means that installing the 190-odd MB for a new base 
vserver takes a matter of seconds - you can have a whole new vserver in 
probably less than 3 minutes.  No such beast exists for yum/rpm distros 
that I know of
 * there is a maintained (for now) dapper+vserver kernel, which makes 
keeping up with vserver very easy

Caveats:
 * no experience with crossing the 64/32-bit barrier
 * no experience with SELinux et al

I used to be a Debian boy, and my main home server is still Debian, but 
it'll be going to Ubuntu soon

Tony