StarDestroyer.Net BBS

It's that time again - time to reinstall my fileserver! It's an old P2...er.. 266 or something ... and it boots off SCSI and runs a PCI RAID card. I installed FC4 on it some time ago, under the impression I might use it for something, but I never do. So I'm looking for a new, secure, relatively lightweight distro for all my file-serving needs.

Fedora Core as been running my fileserver totally happily for several years now.

Straight Debian, also pretty lightweight.

Don't like the idea of slackware's lack of a decent package manager / dependency tracking.

Aptitude (or lack thereof) in Fedora is what keeps me away from it.

Yikes, a 266MHz machine? You'd obviously want one of the lightweight distros. I don't have much experience running lean. My slowest machine is a 1GHz box with 1GB of RAM.

Yeah, I'm running Fedora Core 4 on it at the moment, and simply moving the mouse maxes out the CPU. I initially thought I'd do much more with the machine, but it's ended up being a dumb server box, so I don't need all the extra load.

I use slackware on my old fileserver, lean and mean and doesn't connect directly to the internet (blocked in my router too)

My new fileserver has more file storage, is faster, smaller and takes less juice. It's runs some lightweight stripped down version of linux (appliance) and is very good at what it does (serves files).

Lisa wrote:I use slackware on my old fileserver, lean and mean and doesn't connect directly to the internet (blocked in my router too)

My new fileserver has more file storage, is faster, smaller and takes less juice. It's runs some lightweight stripped down version of linux (appliance) and is very good at what it does (serves files).

An NSLU2? A lot of those devices have custom firmware (http://www.nslu2-linux.org/) so they can be put to other uses as well.

The reason why I haven't gotten one is I like my current fileserver's ability to run Azureus, GTK-gnutella, and various other p2p apps in the background so I can forget about it until downloads are done- other bittorrent clients don't have the amount of features. I can use VNC to find torrents and whatnot on the same machine. These won't run on an embedded device.

Stark wrote:Yeah, I'm running Fedora Core 4 on it at the moment, and simply moving the mouse maxes out the CPU. I initially thought I'd do much more with the machine, but it's ended up being a dumb server box, so I don't need all the extra load.

Don't bother with a GUI in that case: you should be able to manage it via the command line (remotely also, via SSH). It may take a bit of learning, but it won't casuse any functional problems.

Leaner GUIs may work but may take some setup.

I'm partial to my free MsdnAA copy of Windows 2003 Server Enterprise edition

oh, I cant actually get Standard edition of Win2k3, it just comes in Enterprise flavour from my uni's MsdnAA program

Pezzoni wrote:Don't bother with a GUI in that case: you should be able to manage it via the command line (remotely also, via SSH). It may take a bit of learning, but it won't casuse any functional problems.

Yeah, that's how I manage it now. I just figured back in the day I'd use xwindows for something, like uni or whatever. I never did though.

Debian's bare-bones install is just over 300MB, I believe. I would recommend that or Ubuntu's server installation.

The best way to use a GUI on a fileserver is to SSH into it and then run the GUI programs on a remote terminal. I mostly use GUI tools to manage my fileserver, but they display on one of my other machines. The fileserver itself doesn't run an X-server, but I'm not keen on restricting myself to command-line tools if I don't have to.

I prefer VNC since I don't have to remain connected for apps to continue running in the background.