Fedora on the server

[Jim Thario]

Dave Oxley wrote:
> 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