Server distros for newbies

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IceMan
Posts: 19
Joined: Wed Mar 15, 2006 5:43 pm
Location: Denmark - Scandinavia

Server distros for newbies

Post by IceMan » Sat Mar 18, 2006 7:36 pm

Hi,

About two month ago I stumbled upon a pretty nice distro called ClarkeConnect 3.2. This is a dedicated "SOHO" server distribution. The distro is based upon CentOS 4.x. What i really like about this distro is that it is so easy to set up. I had it up and running in about 15 minutes.

userrights, printers and so on are setup via a nice webinterface. it does not get any easier!

the reason why i'm writing this, is that there must millions of old PC's, just sitting there, in the corner, that are not being used. Those PC's could easily be transformed into nice "family" file/web/mail/print servers.

I myself, like to install my servers from scratch, i guess most of us do. However i belive that the majority of "ordenary" windows users can't ! In the case of ClarkeConnect i'm allmost sure that i could guide my dad through the installation via the phone!

I have also noticed the SME server distro, allthough i have not tried it - yet

have any of you guys tried some of these distros, and what are Your impressions !

Links:
CLlarkeConnect 3.2
http://www.clarkconnect.com/

SME server 7.x
http://contribs.org/modules/news/

PS: Please excuse my spelling - i'm from Denmark :-)
IT is No exact science
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Tsuroerusu
Posts: 2551
Joined: Mon Sep 05, 2005 8:51 am
Location: Silkeborg, Denmark
Contact:
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Post by Tsuroerusu » Sun Mar 19, 2006 6:21 am

For fast and easy set up of servers, I really like CentOS, but of course SUSE is great too, even from the commandline both are very very easy to set up.
SUSE's control center YaST has two parts to it, a GUI version and an ncurses version that for example can be run over SSH.

I found a few videos that guides you through setting up a very complete web server with MySQL and PHP, in this case CentOS is the distro: http://cbt4free.org/videos.php

When it comes to Linux, SUSE and CentOS are my favourites. Debian is good too, but I find it a bitch to configure at times. I also like the BSDs for servers, FreeBSD is good for a high performance web server, and OpenBSD is really good if you need a very secure server. NetBSD is handy if you will be running on a very onscure piece of hardware, or a weird-ass architecture that the other two don't support. Of course, BSD is not exactly "easy" to set up, but they've been around for like forever, so I thought I'd mention them :wink:
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