In your experience Best Linux Server Edition

D

demonic

Regular
I know this is kinda a 'how long is a piece of string' type question. But in your experience what is the best (performing) Linux Server Edition?

All I will be running is the OS itself, making sure there is a GUI to do things with ;) and installing Windows 2003 Servers in VMWare Workstation for Linux.

The reason is simple. I am going to be consolidating my enterprise and running all my servers in a virtual state. To skip the licencing requirements from M$ and to save costs, I will be installing Linux for the base operating system for the servers.

Thanks
 
Well, scratch that.

Due to drivers from HP, I am restricted to either:

- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

Or

- SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 10

If anyone has experience of both, let me know.
 
:mad:

This is going from bad to worse lol.

Since I dont want to 'buy' anything, as I wont be needing support. I prefer to wing things lol, well after testing things extensively.

Would anyone know if CentOS server is compatible with Red Hat Enterprise drivers?

Sorry for the newbie questions on Linux lol.
 
I use SLES 9.2 for my main server at work and SuSE 10.2 at home. I used to run RH but their prices have gone through the roof compared to SuSE - especially if you want a 64-bit multiprocessor version.

What's the HP drivers issue? Do you need some sort of proprietary drivers for your server? Is there source available? If you don't need support I'd lean towards Ubuntu.

If the drivers are really an issue there's a very good chance CentOS should handle them.
 
Thanks for replying.

The issue is really the drivers, making sure that the server is using the certified ones from HP.

For example, I want to use HP NIC Teaming.

If CentOS can use the RedHat drivers then theres no issue :)
 
Centos has been 100% RHEL binary compatible in my experience, but Centos 5 isn't out yet. Currently it's only RHEL 4 compatible. You probably won't be able to use HP's smartstart with Centos either.

I pretty much run Centos exclusively now, it's a great Distro.
 
demonic said:
Well there are drivers for RHEL 4. So hopefully it will be ok.

Testing will prove that.
Click to expand...

As long as you don't add in any third party repos, it'll stay RHEL compatible. If you turn on Centos-Extras you can get an updated kernel that's no longer binary compatible. Of course, this is unsupported, your mileage my vary, etc.
 
the maddman said:
As long as you don't add in any third party repos, it'll stay RHEL compatible. If you turn on Centos-Extras you can get an updated kernel that's no longer binary compatible. Of course, this is unsupported, your mileage my vary, etc.
Click to expand...

Well, I will only be running CentOS, installing the drivers for the Network adapters, video and maybe chipset/RAID of they are available.

Then installing VMWare Workstation Linux.

With 2 of the servers will be installing either one of these:-

http://www.amherst.edu/~swplotner/iscsitarget/

http://iscsitarget.sourceforge.net/

Thats it!
 
I create shares using samba, however there is no way, that I know of, for the samba server to authenticate usernames and passwords with a Windows Domain Controller, so you have to add them to the samba server seperately.

I then set the samba shares as the user home directories via Windows Login Scripts and Domain Policies.

Hope that helps.
 
GMâ„¢ said:
I create shares using samba, however there is no way, that I know of, for the samba server to authenticate usernames and passwords with a Windows Domain Controller, so you have to add them to the samba server seperately.

I then set the samba shares as the user home directories via Windows Login Scripts and Domain Policies.

Hope that helps.
Click to expand...

I haven't done it, but winbind does exactly that. From what I hear, it's actually pretty easy to have samba use a AD tree to authenticate users. It'll even let you plug windows into PAM and login to the linux system using your domain password.

All my Centos boxes talk SSL+LDAP to a Novell Active Directory tree.
 
I don't have a lot of experience, so take what I have to say with the requisite grain of salt.

However, the company I work for is quite substantial in size and quantity of servers, and all of our Linux servers (all HP and Compaq-based) are Suse 10.2. We have quite a few octal-proc, 32gb, SAN-attached Suse boxes that contain umpteen VMWare virtual servers that do a LOT of work for us. They never crash, never complain, hell we basically never pay attention to them because they always just work.

The guest OS of the VM's are typically Server 2003, and as such need far more work than the underlying Suse host OS does.
 
I very much prefer Debian myself, mostly because of apt. I would try an Ubuntu Live CD, and if it works (very likely), install Ubuntu server. If that doesn't work, I would prefer SUSE over Red Hat or it's likes. Red Hat always uses something else than most other distros, so it's much harder to manage yourself. Although they do use some nice stuff.

If you want the best tool for the job, simply use the VMware ESX server, although that isn't free.

You can set up Samba to authenticate AD users through the Windows DC without much fuss (net). But it isn't easy to automatically synchronize the user accounts. Winbind sounds like a good solution for that.
 
Thanks, will download it and give it a try

edit: Cant seem to see a server version, but as soon as its available will grab it.
 
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