My company is buying a new Dell server (2x2.4GHz P4 Xeon, 2Gb RAM, 73Gb RAID 1 SCSI) for our production customer facing web site and I have been trying to decide on which Linux distribution to use. It needs to run Apache, tomcat, sendmail, mysql, php and bind and have minimum downtime. We normally have about 25Gb of HTTP traffic a month, but is likely to double over the next 12 months. I am not fussed about having paid for support (that's my job!)
I was going to choose RH9 (after deciding against Debian), but I just found out about Fedora. Is Core 1 suitable for this type of environment? Or would you recommend I go with RH9 or Debian.
Cheers.
Here is how I think about it. This is a customer facing server, so what it is doing works into a larger equation of money for your business. Your company is already laying down money for the new server. What is the percentage of a Red Hat ES license in the total cost of the server + operating system? If it is only 10%-20% I would not think twice about the ES license.
If the piggy bank is dry from the server purchase, I would start on RH9 because the patch system is in place and the patches will continue for several months. As things steady for FC1 (not if) make a plan to move there.
Regards, Jim
