[Wiltshire] Home server OS?

[John Carlyle-Clarke]

On 19/09/11 00:18, Jake Davies wrote:
> Hey guys!
>
> I'm leaving for university on Thursday -- studying Computer Science.
> (big surprise hey?)
>
> I've got an old but faithful Toshiba Celeron "craptop" that's running XP
> and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. Since torrents may be blocked at uni, I can't
> download all those distros! Perhaps I could use the laptop with
> rTorrent, and scp/ftp them across?
>
> I've only had experience with Ubuntu and Arch Linux (my main distro at
> the mo') -- what'd the best distro for a "home server" be? I'll just
> have it plugged into the router, so I have little requirements (no
> wifi/graphics needed), but as a CS student I may want somewhere to serve
> any ghastly PHP I write, or host other crap, perhaps backup, whatever
> slavery servers do. I was either thinking Debian stable or Ubuntu
> server. I only have 'til Thursday to get things up and running
>
> Any suggestions ideas/distro/server wise? I'd plan to firstly backup
> data and then nuke the drive using dban or similar.
>

To add to the general consensus, I'd say Debian or Ubuntu would be fine. 
  I have an old Sony Vaio with a knackered battery and some missing keys 
that runs as my home server, running Ubuntu Server with dovecote, 
postfix, maildrop, fetchmail, lighttpd, deluge, ssh, znc, bitlbee, and 
the usual stuff.  I've had over 200 days uptime from it, thanks to the 
battery being good enough to survive up to 30 minutes power interruption.

I've even done in-place upgrades since Ubuntu 8.04, sometimes over ssh, 
and not so far (touch wood) had a problem.

I know Ubuntu server is not hugely popular, but it has done me very well 
in this instance.