Which distro for office server?

Ed · 8 Feb 2011 at 12:26

We run about 15 laptops (Win7) off a wireless router and now want to create a shared drive as well as a shared localhost to develop a small intranet. It really won't be doing much more than that for a while although remote access could be useful. Which Linux distro would you guys recommend for ease of mapping drives, creating the intranet environment and giving us secure remote access? My only exprience is with Ubuntu and that was a few years ago now.

Thanks for any advice.

kkelly · 8 Feb 2011 at 12:45

Ubuntu Server with Webmin

brendan · 8 Feb 2011 at 12:56

To me, EOL is more important than anything else on servers:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redhat_enterprise_linux#Life_Cycle_Dates

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_server#Releases

if you don't want to pay for redhat use centos, they just recompile RHEL rpms and support goes on for just as long. Also its easy to change a machine from official RHEL to centos and back.

Ubuntu is nice because it may be easier in some ways to use.

russ0r · 9 Feb 2011 at 09:52

Debian.

3dcandy · 9 Feb 2011 at 19:05

possibly stick with Ubuntu if you have some experience with it. at the risk of upsetting the cli experts you may find it quicker to use a gui and go from there...samba is pretty easy to set up with ubuntu 10.10 gui wise, and with the latest updates shares/shared printers/permissions seem much improved to me.

JonJ678 · 10 Feb 2011 at 01:13

Debian or centos are the more obvious choices. I would manage it over ssh, but there are graphical alternatives.

I'm a bit unclear as to what you mean by intranet environment.

craptakular · 10 Feb 2011 at 22:20

Ubuntu is based off of Debian and Debian is arguably the best stable OS.

I would avoid ubuntu on a proper server tbh.

Debian packages are tested for months on end.

JonJ678 · 11 Feb 2011 at 00:18

Oxy said:
Ubuntu is based off of Debian and Debian is arguably the best stable OS.

That could be a nasty argument. Red hat and Slackware both offer it considerable competition. You haven't defined "best" or "stable", so you're open to all sorts of disagreement from conflict of assumed definitions

However I would second the sentiment that Ubuntu shouldn't be on a server (unless Canonical offer support comparable to Red Hat, which I suppose they might do).

craptakular · 11 Feb 2011 at 09:02

Yeh i appreciate what.ur saying. I didn't have.time to do a proper post.

The point i wanted to convey was that for a proper server ubuntu is a poor choice compared to alternatives

3dcandy · 11 Feb 2011 at 09:23

OP has experience with Ubuntu. I don't think that his choice of OS between distro's will be that important in the grand scheme of things, but a time saver in implementing the server might be beneficial!

memyselfandi · 11 Feb 2011 at 10:09

If you went with Redhat be aware that under the new licensing model if you go for the lowest level of support then you cannot now raise support calls, only download patches, so it doesn't really get you anything over running CentOS.

MikeHiow · 11 Feb 2011 at 10:57

Unless it's a large environment where you have the budget to pay for decent Redhat support, for example, then could someone explain why Ubuntu isn't suitable for a server?

I make the move from Debian last year after security patches started to take forever to materialise. If you are a competent admin, do not worry about such conjecture unless you really do have the budget for proper support.

Also, Webmin? Please avoid unless there have been some huge developments over the last few years that have stopped it from being bad.

Sounds like what you need is LVM (I assume by drive mapping you want to chuck a load of disks in for storage as one unified volume?), Samba, Apache and OpenVPN. All are fairly trivial to install and configure.

cooljimy84 · 14 Feb 2011 at 13:21

ubuntu server seems good on the base image side, but as said before they don't seem to test much before rolling out updates to that.....

FirebarUK · 14 Feb 2011 at 18:41

Canonical do offer paid support for Ubuntu Server if you're that fussed on the support side of things.

Personally I'd go for CentOS or Ubuntu LTS. Horses for courses, how often will you upgrade? etc.

Evil-I · 15 Feb 2011 at 12:10

+1 for centos

I'd definately avoid Ubuntu.

Angelos_n · 16 Feb 2011 at 15:01

MikeHiow said:
Unless it's a large environment where you have the budget to pay for decent Redhat support, for example, then could someone explain why Ubuntu isn't suitable for a server?

I make the move from Debian last year after security patches started to take forever to materialise. If you are a competent admin, do not worry about such conjecture unless you really do have the budget for proper support.

Also, Webmin? Please avoid unless there have been some huge developments over the last few years that have stopped it from being bad.

Sounds like what you need is LVM (I assume by drive mapping you want to chuck a load of disks in for storage as one unified volume?), Samba, Apache and OpenVPN. All are fairly trivial to install and configure.

Webmin is pretty good now, especially for managing a web server from home and you cant be bothered with SSH anymore today

brendan · 18 Feb 2011 at 16:56

Angelos_n said:
Webmin is pretty good now, especially for managing a web server from home and you cant be bothered with SSH anymore today

If you don't want to remember so many commands use Suse Linux. Either opensuse or SLES/SLED. They have yast, which is very nice to administrate remote boxes over ssh. It's like an ncurses UI that allows basically all admin tasks.

They also have yast2 that is much more GUI like and not so nice.