Roll your own
Two years ago I bought a new computer which left me with an old one that I thought I could use somehow. I came up with the bright idea to use it as a web server. At that time I also got ADSL with an static IP. Goodie, goodie. Just to let you know, this old computer was a Inter Celeron 300 with only 128Mb. Not to quick I must say.
First I used Windows XP on it with Apache as webserver. That was a drag. Windows XP uses alot of resources which my old computer did not like. Apache worked quiete Ok but when looking at the Apache community most people uses Apache on Linux which started me to think about switching to Linux.
After looking at all the distros I came decided to go with Red Hat. Red Hat was then used my many and had great community. The Red Hat update (It is like windows update) worked fine to update the system. First I ran Red Hat with a grapphical frontend, Gnome. But also this was quite slow. Then I removed the the graphical frontend, installed a SSH server (a secure telnet) and started remotly access the computer from my workstation with SSH. This worked great, sometimes it was kind of slow because of writting all stuff in SSH.
Then one day Red Hat decided to stop producing it’s Red Hat line for private persons. They went corporate and closed their support for me. They moved that over to Fedora, a community based volunteers.
I did not want to switch over to Fedora. The problem with Red Hat is that when a new version comes you will have to install the system from scratch, you cannot update the system. I was not prepared to do this. So I started to look for something else.
After searching for a comparing it came down to two distros; Gentoo and Debian. Gentoo and Debian is stable and used on many production servers. They both have a great community and the update features a super. Debian uses apt-get and Gentoo emerge, both with thousands of packages ready to download. I finally picked Gentoo for it’s posibility optimize the programs and system, as I was on such old computer.
Now I have been running on Gentoo for almost a year and works great. The update feature works great. I have it update the whole system every Saturday night. I run Apache as webserver powered by PHP, Samba for fileserver, MySQL as database, an email server with a web frontend and nice statistics with Cacti and Webalizer. All for free with open source software.
As for the hardware I wrote earlier that the computer is a Intel Celeron 300, I have no fans on the CPU and have installed a Papst 80mm fan in the power suply. The hard drives is set to power down after 10 minutes of inactivity. This makes the computer almost totaly quiet. Now it stands in our closet. I have installed power and ethernet inside the closet so the door can closed. The closet is in our bedroom but it does not disturbe my and my girlfriend when we go to sleep.
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