Chris Johnston

My server died; first I smelled smoke and then the computer just shut itself down. Given the smell of smoke, it was probably a good thing. The downside is that I have had to rebuild my server. Part of the rebuild process was picking an Linux distro to use. The server had been running “CentOS”:http://www.centos.org/.

Lately I have been playing around with Ubuntu as a desktop version of Linux and have been really liking it. For the desktop it is excellent and may actually, finally put Linux on the desktop. Since it has been fairing so well as a desktop OS, I decided to try it as my server OS.

My server is very simple, mostly I just use it as a file server with the home directories shared and one large directory shared that can be used for dumping files. In addition, I also had a second drive in the machine on which everything in a home directory or in the shared directory was mirrored every hour. I realize this is not a true backup system as it also mirrored all deletes (this was mostly to save space). Now that the server is dead and I had to transform the larger of the two internal drives into an external drive, I have lost the backup capabilities.

Anyway, back to Ubuntu; it didn’t work. One thing I really like about CentOS is the administration tools. If I want to configure Samba I just click on the Samba config tool and add shares and users. There are also tools for Services, httpd and other apps. All of these are missing in Ubuntu (at least I couldn’t find them). I would rather use a GUI tool than try and work with config files. This is 2006, I should not have to open a shell and fool around with vim and config files to setup a few Samba shares. This is the main reason that I went back to CentOS.