Linux Linux as a server platform

SUSE is the best linux distro by far.
Suse linux pro 9.1 has everything you need, pre-installed plus MANY tools to help you, not to mention support.

Come on, bite the bullet and friggin do it.
Yast2 rules!

 

nah gentoo man its all about the gentoo

 

if your gonna shove this box on the intarweb you have to realise that most distros will be very unsecure and can take a fair bit of effort to secure them. For debian there is a rather lengthy securing debian-howto which should help you remove insecure bits. I mean default services like telnet, inetd, libsvga to name a few are fairly insecure.

http://www.linuxsecurity.com/resource_files/host_security/securing-debian-howto/index.en.html