I'm looking for peoples opinions based on experience. I'm currently looking at setting up two network servers and originally the company wanted to go with Windows until I mentioned how badly a rebbot/month or week would affect their uptime calculations.
This is the short list of the main things that will be running on the machines (assume hardware configuration is unimportant):
Primary: no GUI, BIND, DHCP, SSH
Secondary: no GUI, BIND, DHCP (only started if primary fails), SSH, Apache, PHP/Perl/Python packages, MRTG
The only additional software is the possibile inclusion of some VPN management software, running on Primary with a copy on secondary for redundancy.
Machines will be behind their own hardware firewall, so that does not need to be takn into account.
The secondary will be taking over as DHCP if the primary disappears, plans include a third server as a mirror of the first down the road so that the second would still take over in case of catastrophic destruction of the first server until someone could plug in the third server, at which point the second would resume it's normal duties (monitoring network and occasionally handling DNS requests).
Right now I am looking at FreeBSD and a 2.6 Linux build. The security in Open is supposedly better from what I have read, but the scalability (very important) is suposedly best from these two.
The webserver will only be running to make the RTG graphs and data available. Python is included to tie into MRTG because my Python is a lot stronger then my Perl
I apologize if I left anything off the list for installations, I'm still on my first cup of coffee and haven't gotten much sleep this week. I'm looking mostly for a little validation for my choise on using a 2.6 or FreeBSD and something that would be even more helpful would be some suggestions as to which 2.6 distro would work the best in this type of situation (apt get would be nice, and yes I know this is likely a request for straight up opinion, but thats fine).
I have done a great deal of reading on this already, but reading articles by people I don't know and getting informaiton rom people I do know (who have shown real experience with the systems) is differant in my book. Thanks for any information or opinions you can offer,
-T
--
Also, just remembered. I have not run a BSD system before (though I have done some work with flavors of Solaris and some older Unix boxes) and my Linux experience is basically RH 7/8/9 Mandrake 8/9 and a little contact with SUSE. In other words, optimization is nioce, but assume I couldn't optimize a system beyond the basics without hurting myself
01000111 01101111 01110100 00100000 01000011 01101111 01100110 01100110 01100101 01100101 00111111
The never-completed website:
This is the short list of the main things that will be running on the machines (assume hardware configuration is unimportant):
Primary: no GUI, BIND, DHCP, SSH
Secondary: no GUI, BIND, DHCP (only started if primary fails), SSH, Apache, PHP/Perl/Python packages, MRTG
The only additional software is the possibile inclusion of some VPN management software, running on Primary with a copy on secondary for redundancy.
Machines will be behind their own hardware firewall, so that does not need to be takn into account.
The secondary will be taking over as DHCP if the primary disappears, plans include a third server as a mirror of the first down the road so that the second would still take over in case of catastrophic destruction of the first server until someone could plug in the third server, at which point the second would resume it's normal duties (monitoring network and occasionally handling DNS requests).
Right now I am looking at FreeBSD and a 2.6 Linux build. The security in Open is supposedly better from what I have read, but the scalability (very important) is suposedly best from these two.
The webserver will only be running to make the RTG graphs and data available. Python is included to tie into MRTG because my Python is a lot stronger then my Perl
I apologize if I left anything off the list for installations, I'm still on my first cup of coffee and haven't gotten much sleep this week. I'm looking mostly for a little validation for my choise on using a 2.6 or FreeBSD and something that would be even more helpful would be some suggestions as to which 2.6 distro would work the best in this type of situation (apt get would be nice, and yes I know this is likely a request for straight up opinion, but thats fine).
I have done a great deal of reading on this already, but reading articles by people I don't know and getting informaiton rom people I do know (who have shown real experience with the systems) is differant in my book. Thanks for any information or opinions you can offer,
-T
--
Also, just remembered. I have not run a BSD system before (though I have done some work with flavors of Solaris and some older Unix boxes) and my Linux experience is basically RH 7/8/9 Mandrake 8/9 and a little contact with SUSE. In other words, optimization is nioce, but assume I couldn't optimize a system beyond the basics without hurting myself
01000111 01101111 01110100 00100000 01000011 01101111 01100110 01100110 01100101 01100101 00111111
The never-completed website: