Re: Linux distro for new server?

[montezf@gmail.com]

Now is a good time to take a step back and really look at what you can do here.  I'm firmly in the one task per server camp.  How about taking a second look at entertaining running a virtual environment.  Which one you choose doesn't really matter as long as it is something that you can be comfortable with.

You could go with something like Vyatta as the firewall vm, or m0n0wall, IPCop or any of the other various distributions suited for this purpose.  Even a UTM like Endian, SmoothWall or Untangle could work.  

Hopefully you aren't using the web front end as your dev machine.  So I dunno if it really matters which distribution you go with.  But if you had to have an answer, I would say Ubuntu Server would probably get my vote.  Debian stable is nice, but unless you're going to put a lot into your toolchain to make sure you can recover from an incident or disaster, Ubuntu Server will probably get you back up and running with slightly less of a headache.

Your server is getting long in the tooth but still operational.  If you think a virtual environment is inevitable then you should look at moving there now.  Once you get something implemented, it'll be difficult or impossible to decouple them.  As a thought, you could setup your virtual infrastructure and P2V your existing server and have it running on your new hardware as a virtual while you kinda get your feet wet the the VM stuff and get the replacement environment built out.