[CLUE-Admin] New hardware for web server.

[David Anselmi]

jccann at attbi.com wrote:
 >
 > It turns out that my current case is not going to work with the new
 > MB.  So I can safely donate an entire system, minus HDD.  I figure we
 > can simply pull them from ta8 and plop them into the new box.

Are you going to use the old HDD?  If you now have ATA 100 you'll want 
ATA 100 drives.  No big deal, the server has room--just curious.

 > If we want to rebuild, that's okay with me.  We probably should get
 > together and discuss it at the next CLUE admin meeting so we can plan
 > accordingly.  I have no problem with Debian.

I think we should.  We could use a new Apache, and top segfaults 
currently (which ticked me off again today when Mike asked me why things 
were so slow with the mail).  And we have that goofy libc5/libc6 setup 
that makes ls show the wrong times.  On the other hand, it works.

 > As a die-hard slackware user (6 years) until this last January, I
 > thought the same thing, but Mandrake has a very slick upgrade system
 > for rpms.

How easy is is to get new stuff from Mdk?  I saw an article today about 
the OpenSSH bug in <3.4.  It said most vendors hadn't released 3.4 and 
had a workaround for 3.3.  I've had 3.4 on Debian (woody) for a while. 
SuSE 7.3 by comparison is still on 2.9.9.  There was an upgrade that I 
got today--2.9.9p1 to 2.9.9p2.  I assume that they backported the fix 
but I don't know.  I'm not used to working with vendor patches so I 
prefer to stay close to the 'official' versions.

 > Debian is fine with me.  I like the fact that it is hard-core GNU, so
 > I think it's a Good Thing (tm) to run it on our server.

That's something else that I like about Debian.  I don't have to worry 
about being told that I'll have to pay to get access to updates some 
day.  But my preference is due to familiarity and not real experience so 
I'm happy to hear other opinions.

Dave