[MLUG] advantages of various Linux distro choices for server

[Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

We're looking at getting probably a 2-CPU Xeon 2.8 GHz with probably 8 GB
RAM, three 73 GB 15,000 RPM fast SCSI disks, two gigabit ethernet cards,
and more.  This would be used by faculty, staff and students in our
department (Division of Epidemiology at U Minnesota), so there would be
hundreds of accounts on the machine.  People would run SAS, e-mail, web
service, file/printer sharing, etc.  We were looking at Dell and HP prices
and seeing things we liked for about $12,000.  We want to run Linux on
this server and it looks like it's easy to buy one with Red Hat Linux (and
there are various Red Hat choices), but I'm wondering about the advantages
and disadvantages of various Linux distribution choices for this kind of
machine.

I suppose this could turn into a big "distro war", but I'm not afraid of
that.  I don't think we've ever had this kind of discussion because we are
almost always focused on smaller desktop machines.  If I don't feel
persuaded by arguments favoring alternatives to Red Hat for this server,
I'll just go with Red Hat because it's easy to buy a machine with Red Hat
preinstalled and most computer people seem to be familiar with Red Hat.
I'm sure I'll learn a lot from all of you because I don't know much about
running Linux on a big server.

Mike

P.S., the reason for Xeon instead of, say, Itanium 2, is that we are
heavily dependent on SAS and must be able to run SAS on the server.  SAS
won't run on 64-bit Linux (e.g., on Itanium 2), so we're sticking with an
Intel 32-bit architecture for our first Linux machine.
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