I have personally had better luck with Mandrake than with RedHat. However, RedHat 7.1 is a little more enterprise-centric. One thing it does nicely is allow you to configure all your settings on one server, and when you have everything the way you want it, you can create a custom install disk that will replicate that configuration on the other machines (assuming they are identical).
Even though my real recommendation would be to use FreeBSD or Slackware or Debian and learn to love the command line, I guess you have already chosen. In order to give you any real advice about partitioning, I need to know the system specs: number of hard disks, disk type (SCSI or IDE), RAM, etc...
Don't just trust the install wizard to walk you through the setup. While those have gotten more sophisticated, there is no way they can prepare you for everything. Read the documentation thoroughly before you install. Since you are new to Linux, I would suggest visiting
and
when you get a little more advanced. These are great resources to explain system configuration.
Learn to use Midnight Commander ("mc" on the command line). If you are used to Windows/DOS, mc will be your greatest friend; it's basically a Unix version of the old Norton System Commander utility, giving you a file browser/manager, along with a fairly capable text editor.
Probably what you want to do is choose the standard server install, and if prompted as to whether you want a graphical login, choose NO. You want a simple command-line login. Only run X-windows when you need it. The graphical login is a security hazard, as well as a resource drain.
THEN... you will want to use "ntsysv" and choose what programs you want in system startup. Get rid of everything you don't need, as any extra network process is an additional security hazard. Edit inetd.conf and comment out the telnet server, as well as just about anything else (rlogin, sunrpc, etc...) except ftp, if you need it. To replace telnet, get Secure Shell, at
which is an encrypted telnet server/client, providing much better protection. Make any of your clients who want telnet access install a Secure Shell client on their machine. You can also get Secure FTP at
. If you can convince your clients to use it, then also turn off the regular ftp server. (telnet and ftp send information in clear text, so anyone who can hack into the data stream can know what's going on.)
If you plan to be doing any extended server-side web programming, you might want to install Apache with the Apache+PHP+MySQL option, as that allows PHP programming with database connectivity. It's much easier and more optimized for webserving than Perl, however, it is a bit of a security risk if you have many users; since PHP runs as a single user ("nobody"
, there is increased risk of one user getting access to another user's data.
Hope that gives you something to start on...
