Best 64-bit Linux distro for webserver...

[DaFinn]

Just build a new machine to host my company website. Its directed at our customers and would host a photobank, videos and product info...

Machine:
-Asus SK8N
-Opteron 140
-1Gb (2x512Mb) Samsung reg. ECC PC3200.
-Geforce 4 MX 440 64Mb AGP.
-2x 120Gb SATA Raid-1 (Maxtor Maxline II)
-...

I'm not experienced Linux user, but have been toying around a bit for couple of years.
Which distro would be "easy" to setup, and has good support for above combo. Just a no frills http/ftp server.

Which firewall?

Which AV?

Thanks!

 

[Sunner]

That motherboard, or rather the chipset, is was sucks about it.
nVidia has had a very adamant anti open source stance for a long time.
There are drivers, but last time I played with them(which was quite a while ago admittedly) they were a complete PITA on anything but Redhat, and possibly other Redhatish distros.

That aside, I'd recommend Debian, for things such as webservers, nameservers, etc, it is by far the best IMO.

 

[drag]

Generally I prefer Debian, but I don't know if their AMD64 port is finished yet or not.

Probably the next best bet would be Suse, Redhat or Fedora.

I am leaning towards Redhat, but they cost money. So I don't know how much you were looking to spend on this thing. But they do have nice features like support and SELinux for security.

Novell offers Suse. The Suse 9.3 is the newest version, but it costs, you can get Suse 9.2 for no-cost from their ftp servers though.

For the firewall, I'd probably just use the normal Iptables-based firewall. Redhat/Fedora, I know, has one by default, and probably Suse will too. Otherwise their are scripts and tools to help you set one up.


For anti-virus, probably just clamav. i'd probalby just set it up and have a cron job update it every week, and another one to automaticly scan the directories were people can upload ftp files and such. You don't have much to worry about for the server itself, but sometimes infected files can be e-mailed or uploaded by windows users and you don't want other windows users to download them by accident from your server.

there are ways to set it up so that you automaticly scan e-mail if you want to setup a email server or whatnot.

 

[Nothinman]

For a webserver the 64-bit part is irrelevant, just install 32-bit Debian and run with it.

Which firewall?

All Linux kernels come with netfilter, but writing rules isn't that fun. Generally the box should be behind a hardware firewall anyway.

Which AV?

If you really want to install one there are clamav packages in Debian, but you probably don't need it.

 

[keeleysam]

For 64-bit server with that mobo, I would go with Fedora Core 3

 

[n0cmonkey]

Redhat Enterprise Linux.

 

[DaFinn]

Thanks for suggestions. Dl:ing Fedora Core 3 now... I'll see how that goes.