linux server distro (firewall, HTTP, FTP, seed box)

Trifid

Trifid

Trifid

Soldato
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18 Feb 2006
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I have finally got hold of an old system (Dell GX50) and am currently formatting it from Windows 2000.

I am unsure what distro to stick on there though so am asking the great OcUK.

What I want to have on there is:
firewall before the internet (will I need 2 nics, or will setting every PC on the LAN with a default gateway to this PC be sufficient?
HTTP
FTP
torrent download & seed client (transmission 0.8? Azureus?)
Pop3, SMTP.
Remote desktop such as VNC that needs to work across the internet with web interface like logmein. (This is obviously to get around the proxy when I am not connected into an admin port.)

I currently have already burnt, OpenSUSE, Mandriva and Ubuntu Dapper and Edgy. I am happy to download others. Is ClarkConnect any good for what I want to do?

Also how do you use smart boot manager. Can't for the life of me work it out. :/ It just gives me a list of languages...

Thanks for the help. :)
 
I've used Ubuntu Server for all those tasks and it worked pretty nicely. Im sure more you could also try CentOS or similar to great effect as well. I used Torrentflux. It's web-based so you can do all your downloading and uploading remotely. It's extremely slick and since you'll have LAMP all ready to go setup should be a breeze.
 
You've got to love Linux's ability to be on one system and then on another 5 mins later that don't share anything in common apart from the hard drive that it was installed on. All I had to do was reconfigure xserver. :D

(The PC wouldn't read the Xubuntu disk, so I installed it from my 'gaming' PC. :cool: )
 
If you're running "server" apps on Xubuntu you might wish to change to one of the server kernels. They're optimized for server tasks and throughput rather than the responsiveness that a desktop requires.
 
Trifid said:
I thought xubuntu was the server :o

on the plus i got it to boot from cd, installing server now.
Click to expand...
Xubuntu is just Ubuntu with Xfce as the main window manager instead of Gnome.

You could always move away from linux to a more dedicated server OS such as FreeBSD.
 
Yeah. After I posted I did some research and found many people recommend it for a noob friendly home server.

I am using Ktorrent as the client. It's picking up quite a few bad segments though. I'm not too keen on rTorrent as a few torrents I haven't downloaded all of (1 to 50GB in sized ones) and it isn't clear how I would select which one to go for.

Ubuntu server is going to stay on there until I find a 160GB or so IDE HDD on members market. I will experiment with a variety of OS's to see what I like.

Is there a web based VNC viewer available for Linux? Things like logmein to get around annoying proxy that blocks words like "displaymate".
 
I must reccommend CentOS for a server (RHEL without the branding and cost involved.) Ubuntu just seems far too ameturish and diverse for the job (like using a Swiss Army Knife to carve the Sunday joint with)
 
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