I need a new server distro

[Lonni J Friedman]

On Fri, Feb 15, 2013 at 10:13 AM, Michael Hipp <michael at redmule.com> wrote:
> Can anyone recommend a distro suitable for use in a small server:
>
> 1) Simple easy-to-use installer
> 2) Server install has no GUI anywhere, everything can be done by ssh cli
> 3) Knows how to configure software RAID in the installer and boot
> degraded afterwards and I never have to touch an mdadm command unless I
> just want to
> 4) Fairly up-to-date server software stack (e.g. samba, postgresql,
> postfix, rsync, etc.)

Funny you should ask, as I'm about ready to ditch Fedora after
tolerating its increasing "windows-ification" for years.  Between the
horrible abortion that is Fedora18, and an attempted F16 -> F17
upgrade that trashed my RPM database beyond repair, I've had enough.
I'm starting to look at Gentoo, but that doesn't really meet your
requirements.  If you had asked a year ago, I would have recommended
Fedora, but now, I'm not sure what to say.  I'm sure someone will
chime in suggesting Ubuntu, but in my opinion its an unstable,
unreliable, buggy crapfest.  SUSE is ok, but all signs suggest that
SUSE is becoming more & more marginalized, and may not exist in a few
years.

If you can skip #4, then CentOS/RHEL6 would be a good match for your
requirements.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by #3.  If you dont' want a GUI
anywhere, and you don't want to touch mdadm, then how do you expect to
manage a SW RAID array?  magic elves?  If a disk dies or you want to
replace a disk, or grow the size of the array, you have to touch
mdadm.