[luau] Best Linux Server?

[Dustin Cross]

Aloha,

What is the best distro choice for a simple web/webmail server.  My SuSE
7.3 Sparc Ultra II server has been great for over two years, but I am
starting to worry that I don't have any routine back-ups or disk
mirroring.  If anything happened to this server Sandi would be very unhappy.

I am thinking of building an inexpensive x86 with cheap IDE raid 0
controller and two drives.  Is there a solid distro that is easy to keep up
to date, (i.e. automated)?  I use SuSE's Online Update all the time now and
it works okay.  Do any of the other distros have anything better?  What
about Gentoo and its "emerge"?

I don't have much time to spend keeping this system up-to-date and secure.
Sadly my best security defense has been using sparc hardware, NO ONE writes
exploits for Linux on Sparc hardware.  If I switch to an inexpensive x86
systems this won't be the case anymore.

So what does everyone reccomend?


My currect systems is:

SuSE 7.3, Apache, Postfix, Imap, Squirrel Mail, PHPGroupware, Spam
Assassin, and Procmail

What I am looking for is reccomendation on distro (SuSE, Redhat, Mandrake,
Gentoo, etc) and recomendation for inexpensive IDE Raid 0 card that works
with linux.

Or maybe I should just buy a second 36GB SCA SCSI drive, rebuild my Sparc
and use software raid to mirror the drives.  What does everyone think about
Gentoo for this?

Is there any benefit to the inexpensive IDE raid cards over software raid?


Mahalo,
Dusty

P.S. I would use my beloved OpenBSD for this but then I waste the second
CPU in my Ultra II and I didn't see any inexpensive IDE raid cards
supported under OpenBSD.