Hello guys, I am not sure if this is right forum to ask but I hope it is. I would like to run my own server and it would really help me if you could answer some of my questions. I would like to host on my server few personal websites probably in java, Minecraft server, mail server, probably own DNS(not sure about this one if I need it or not), TeamSpeak server, and data repository. I would like to go with nginx for HTTP and with MariaDB as a SQL server. What Linux distro would you recommend me? I am thinking about Debian Wheezy or Squeeze. How should I partition my disk? Do you know about some good reading/guides I could use? Thanks a lot in advance for helping me.
I would definately go Centos 6.6 ... It's a rock solid distro and the memory usage is extremely low that is extremely stable.. After trying a bunch of distrobutions over the last 5 years, and using linux for the last 20, I wouldn't use anything but Centos for my main server.. That is to say though, I do have one server running my last distro of choice, Ubuntu 12.04 Edit: See till's response below CentOs has issues keeping things the same in regards to ISPConfig and duplicate packages in centos repositories. Personally while I love CentOs for my main server (which does *not* run ISPConfig and runs *only* normal apache sites just great), this server project I am doing now requires ISPConfig. I will side with the developers choice and their suggestion to use Debian. Personally I would rather avoid a possible painful headache in the future... Also better because this is due to their vast past production experience with ISPConfig.
I recommend to use Debian. We maintain many servers for customers incl. Debian, Ubuntu, OpenSuSE and Centos systems and Debian is by far the most stable and easy to maintained option. With Centos you get the problem that a lot of packags are missing in the main repositiry, you will then have to add third party repositories like epel and others and this will sooner or later lead to problems when the same package exists in several repositories under the same name. So Centos is good as long as you dont ned any special software that is not in the base repo. Debian Squeze is too old but Debian Wheezy is good choice.
Till is correct. I will edit my previous post. I read the forum thread regarding centos and it's problems with duplicate packagses - after - I replied to this... @till - do you suggest people running on CentOs to use Debian if possible? The server I set up is a new node, thus the only thing at a loss for is set up time. Luckily this reminder came before I went forward with my CentOs install. I read the suggestion you left on another forum but thought I may be okay with going forward with my CentOs ISPConfig installation if I was just careful and did not touch much.. But your post made me rethink this strategy as I could easily see me kicking myself in the future - and I would rather avoid that.
If you are familar with Centos and like it, then its ok to use it off course. Personally I had too much trouble in the past with package conflicts so that I'am not a fan of including third party repos anymore. The centos core is rock solid, no doubts but in the long run I had more dependency and dist upgrade issues with centos then with debian. Just my personal opinion: Just an example that I had yesterday on a centos 6.x server of a client, this server has some load issues sometimes and I decided to install munin to see what happens when the problem happens. The munin install failed due to a dependency issue, a perl package (SAX library) was installed from rpmforge as dependency of amavisd. Munin now wanted to have the same package, but from base (or epel), I dont remember exactly. This server is highly loaded, so I would now have to uninstall this package, which removes amavisd which needs this perl lib, then exclude this package from rpmforge repo and install amavisd and about 5 other software packages again to be able to finally install munin. So while thats all possible and can be resolved, I would like to avoid that and Debian with its huge package base contains nearly everything you could think of in its repos, so most debian systems dont need any third party repositories. Another pro for debian is that you can do a dist upgrade on a live system, Centos introduces that as well with centos 7, but thy still say that this is experimental. The traditional way of upgrading centos is to boot the server from a dvd and run the upgrade, but thats not easy when you have a server without dvd dribve somewhere in a datacenter.
Hi there For the next time, please use a descriptive title for the problem and not just a generic one. That makes it easier for others to help.
I am a longtime Centos user (back to Centos 4.x) as it was the logical choice for WHM/cPanel. So it was with a great deal of apprehension I decided to accept the recommendation to use Debian as a base for ISPConfig. Even more daring I chose the 'paint is not quite dry yet' Jessie release. Absolutely no problems with the OS (as opposed to my steep learning curve on MySQL mirroring). I chose Jessie rather than Wheezy simply because it would mean I could run the servers longer without having to do another major os upgrade. And the last thing you want to be doing with a production server is to upgrade unless its a security vulnerability. So breathe in and enjoy Jessie.
Love these post. Gonna quote it. I'm always wondering which OS is the best for ISPConfig. One question, if Debian is better, why Cpanel only supports CentOS?
This has been explained so often by many advanced ispconfig users here in the forum, so I wont explain that again Thats quite easy to explain, cpanel does not really use centos packages, it comes with its own packages for all services. So it does not matter for cpanel that many packages are missing or require third party repositorys as they just use the kernel, the shell and a few basic packages. ISPConfig on the opposite, uses the packages of the Linux Distribution that it is running on for apache, mysql, ftp, dns etc. The benefit is that you will get security updates faster on a ISPConfig server as all security updates are coming directly from the sec teams of the different Linux distributions and that ispconfig is using the default config files and config file locations for the installed software.
