For small home web/file server: Gentoo or Windows IIS?

[GTaudiophile]

I currently run Gentoo Linux on an old PII-450/256MB RAM machine at home. It's both a personal LAN file server (SAMBA) and a web server (APACHE). The web server hosts small, personal stuff, nothing like my main photography web site that is maintained by Telnap. Sometime soon I will build a new main rig, give my old rig to my dad, and then take his current rig, a PIII-866/512MB machine, and use it as a server instead of the PII-450 machine. When I do this, should I go back to Gentoo, mess with another Linux distro, or play with Windows XP SP2 with IIS installed? I don't know too much about IIS, but I figure it can at least do the same as SAMBA and APACHE. My guess is that such a Windows machine is still far more vulnerable than a machine running the latest release of Gentoo with all right holes patched.

Thoughts, opinions, comments?

 

[Traire]

Gentoo + Apache > WinXP + IIS

Stick with Linux unless you have some windows specific apps you want to run.

:thumbsup:

 

[KB]

Windows XP only allows 10 concurrent sessions. Those sessions can fill up with anywhere from 2 - 10 people connected, so I wouldn't bother with windows. Try ubuntu.


"My guess is that such a Windows machine is still far more vulnerable than a machine running the latest release of Gentoo with all right holes patched."

Both OS's are only as secure as their administrator is.

 

[GTaudiophile]

Originally posted by: Traire
Gentoo + Apache > WinXP + IIS

Stick with Linux unless you have some windows specific apps you want to run.

:thumbsup:

No I don't. But Gentoo seems like it takes a lot longer to get running...

I am thinking about installing an SATA RAID PCI card, and I wonder if Gentoo will have the right drivers for it.

Let's say I am running two 200GB harddrives in RAID 0, creating a 400GB drive. Let's say the goal was to run both a web and file server. Would it make sense to create at least two partitions, one for the web server, and one for the file server. Or does it not make a difference in Gentoo?

 

[Drakkon]

linux will always have an edge over windows in the security arena but so long as your not advertising your server, run your server behind a decent hardware firewall/router with security enabled, you should be ok, and running windows I'd say a good 90% of the time is a lot easier to install stuff/update patches/check on logs than linux is.

 

[Nothinman]

As much as I like Linux I wouldn't run Gentoo unless I absolutely had to.

Debian.

 

[timswim78]

Maybe you would want to run Apache on Windows. Then you can run your fileserver without SAMBA.

 

[GTaudiophile]

For my purposes, Gentoo has been relatively painless. No one here is a fan of Emerge? Are there any other distros that know how to update themselves so well?

 

[n0cmonkey]

OpenBSD has a better ports system.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: GTaudiophile
For my purposes, Gentoo has been relatively painless. No one here is a fan of Emerge? Are there any other distros that know how to update themselves so well?

Debian does it better.

 

[Nothinman]

For my purposes, Gentoo has been relatively painless. No one here is a fan of Emerge? Are there any other distros that know how to update themselves so well?

emerge is slow, written in python and doesn't do dependency checking on removal. I could probably come up with more shortcomings but that's the quick list. Debian is lightyears ahead of Gentoo in package quality and management.

 

[episodic]

I do the exactly same thing you do. What I found to be an excellent easy to use solution was Libranet 2.81.

It is a very easy to intall debian distro. I'm a relative newb, and I had everything running including apache with mysql/php all chugging along in a mere 5 hours (including a long painful install on a pentium II 266 - which of course is no libranet's fault.). . .

 

[GTaudiophile]

Okay, I will give Debian a try. But I am still concerned about compatibility/driver support with this SATA RAID solution.

 

[Nothinman]

If you're really going to try Debian make sure you grab an install disc from http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/ and install sarge.

As for that SATA controller, I don't personally have one but it looks like it's supported by the sata_sil driver.

 

[DJFuji]

Decide what technologies you want enabled first. No use installing linux if you want to run asp.net/SQL Server.