[Sussex] My First Server...

[Paul Graydon]

One of the perks of working for a large ISP is the existance of what 
they call their 'dirty' LAN, effectively three 47u cabinets set aside 
for staff use; with an associated block of IP addresses.  Provided 
you're either exceptionally good, or work in what they consider a 
skilled enough department (like my role in the NOC), you get the 
possibility to use up to 4u of cab space with various provisos about not 
using it for illegal activity or earning money through it blah, blah.  
My slot has now been confirmed, and I've just aquired an old server 
through flea-bay (amd 1.7ghz jobby, so ample fast enough for most purposes).
Now comes the fun part... Distro choosing for it.  I'm a Gentoo fan by 
preference mainly because its the only distro I've not experienced major 
hassles with getting specific stuff done on; but whilst the bandwidth 
would be great for all the necessary source downloading, I just can't 
think it would be justified on a server, nor do I want to spend that 
long installing Gentoo whilst stuck inside one of our Docklands data 
centres (too much noise).  Currently I'm thinking Ubuntu Server edition, 
as a number of our platforms are increasingly Ubuntu based at the back end.
I'm not really experienced that much with Ubuntu, has anyone got any 
links to decent wiki's for it?  I'm not wanting the 'corporate' line on 
it, I'm looking for real world stuff :)
My other big like of Gentoo was that it only installed exactly what I 
wanted, leaving a much smaller footprint, and no junk (one of the 
reasons I don't like most Distros is that in an effort to distinguish 
themselves from other distros they figure more packages by default = 
better distro.)  Do folks have any other reccomendations for a Distro?  
One thing I definately don't need is a GUI on it, given it'll be sitting 
in a rack, and I dislike VNC!  SSH is all I need/want.  At the moment 
I'm just thinking your typical LAMP + Exim setup for its primary 
purpose, and possibly running a p/w protected CounterStrike Source 
server for an occasional laugh with mates.

Paul G