Hi all, My company I work for is investing in a new internal server which works as a dev environment/mail server (internal only)/file server. The new spec is going to be a core2duo 2.33 (I think), a hefty amount of ramm, 250gb for OS/Progs and 2x 500gb which will be mirrored for files/development files. The main question is what flavour of Linux to use, our main dedicated server for live website uses Red Hat Enterprise, we are considering Ubuntu 64bit Server Edition, or perhaps Fedora 64bit. First of all, is there any issues you could see with the above setup? Any suggestions? Any current in-house environments you could recommend, and would Apache/MySql running on our dedicated mess with Apache running on a different distro locally.
It's probably best to stick with a similar (if not the same) environment that you have on the other server.. If any changes are made in the future, or if either server is re-purposed (even slightly) then you may well be grateful for it. In that respect, you should probably look towards RHE or CentOS, which is essentially RHE with the branding removed (copyright reasons - RedHat sales people do not like it when you mention CentOS. ) With regards to servers, Fedora is a little too 'cutting edge' for my likes. You would be better with the Ubuntu Server LTS releases, to be fair. However, my original recommendation would still be to keep it similar. Hardware query: doesn't it bother you if the OS drive fails?
How can I make sure its ok when the OS drive fails? Other than taking an image of it once its setup? We were moving towards Ubuntu, but if a Linux guru is pointing us towards CentOS (was suggested by our boss) then maybe we should go with that.
If your main servers are RHEL then go with centOS keeping with the same base distro is much simpler, trying to swap between Red Hat type distro to a Debian type distro can be a bit confusing. At least to me....
I'm a Linux guru? What a title. Anyway, why not mirror the OS, too? Doesn't even have to be hardware-based. Could just be LVM/mdraid.
Just put on RHEL or CentOS... Don't mix systems, most admins don't like that... Don't use Ubuntu, if you want to go that way, go Debian... Same base (Ubuntu is based upon Debian), but a lot less "forced" stuff/bloat... And get a smaller drive for the OS, 250GB is way overkill... You can RAID1 the OS drive too. It just depends how heavily used the dev server will be, and how important the uptime of it is...
Thanks for the input guys, sounds like CentOS is probably going to be the choice to make RHEL for an inhouse dev server won't really be an option as it costs about £400 p/a to keep which is silly money for a box used by 5 developers, 2 admins, and 3 designers.
