Ok, what should I use for a school's fileserver?

[mchaney]

I work for a school. I'm trying to replace a Win2k server that's having weird problems. I want to use Linux for the new machine. I've tried Mandrake 9.2 but that doesn't seem to want to work. I think the nice automated control centers and stuff are screwing things up when I try to do things outside of their capabilities. Here's what I need the server to do:

Samba primary domain controller and file sharing to ~175 computers.

Automated Backup of some kind. Ideally a RAID1, with one of the disks being in a removable hard drive caddy that gets swapped out for another every week or so. Barring that, something that clones the drive with /home on it to the removable caddy every night would work.

Some kind of GUI remote administration that the librarian and computer teachers can use to set/change people's passwords and groups etc. Webmin would work I think.

So which distro do you recommend for this? The machine is a dual 1.0 ghz PIII with 1 gig of RAM.

[ph34r]

Any, but I'd go for either Slackware or Debian. If you need pointy-clicky, you could use Fedora or the educationally priced RH AS version... $50. :)

[mehmet]

Have you looked at rhems (http://rhems.sourceforge.net)?
Basically a redhat install, combines open source apps to achieve what you want....

Regards, Mehmet

[squeegy]

I second ph34r's response with Slackware or debian.

[matt2kjones]

Slackware or Debian is a Good Choice.

i would say away from fedora, its not designed for a server platform (redhat will also stop releasing updates for fredora 3 months after a new version is released. and they try to release a new version every 3 - 6 months).

Slackware i use on my servers, its fast, and stable, yet to have a single crash ever since i have been using slackware for the many years i've been using it

it comes with a nice package manager that has no depenadancies as well. which will kinda get you away from the dependancie nightmares you get in distros such as mandrake, redhat, fedora, etc, that use .rpm

Samba has been tested along side windows 2003 server platforms, and actually out performed a windows 2003 server at both speed and reliability. So samba diffinently has the abuilty to server 200+ machines

as for the Raid, i havent really done much with that, so i will leave someone else answer your questions about that.

hope this helps

Matt.

[mrBen]

Given the power you have available, you could install pretty much anything you want.

SuSE might be worth a look, in the wake of RedHat. In addition, you could look at one or two of the 'dedicated' distributions out there, that are designed for file serving.