Hello,
I'm preparing to switch from running SpamAssassin on Windows (cygwin) to running it under Linux, I'm looking for suggestions on which distro of linux to use for my server. It'll be a mail relay (no local users). I've got my heart set at Debian, but looking for pro's and con's and someone with more experience to shed some insight. This will be for an ISP with over 5,000 mail accounts.
Thanks for your time,
Frederic Tarasevicius
I have two SA boxes (boxen?), one at work, one at home. Both run Debian Stable (v3, aka Woody), and I wouldn't have it any other way. Mostly because of my own bias, as I've been using Debian since '96, and am most familiar with it's packaging, installation routines, and file system layout than with any other distro.
The only problem you'll encounter with Debian is it tends to be stale in comparison to other distros. This is usually because everything is very rigorously tested for more platforms than just about any other distro. Thus, for a package like SpamAssassin that you'll always wish to keep current, you'll either need to install it by hand from source, or backport an "unstable" package to the stable branch. Both are pretty easy to do, and you can often find them done for you at apt-get.org.
For reference, both my SA boxes run Exim v4.30 and SA v2.63, installed as Debian packages backported from sid (unstable). I've also backported Razor 2.36 and SA-Exim 3.1, as well as a few required Perl libraries. Again, you could install all of these things by hand from source, but I prefer to package and install them properly. It helps with tracking what's installed, and keeps file locations in sync with "the Debian way".
FWIW, I run Gentoo on my desktops. It keeps my need for bleeding edge apps on the desktop (for feature purposes), and the filesystem layout and configuration files make sense to me. Plus, the user community is FANTASTIC. The only downside is compiling everything sucks. On a slower box (1Ghz), KDE takes almost 24 hours.
I despise Redhat and it's spawn, and thus can't recommend them, although many, many people seem to like Redhat / Fedora.
Steven -- Steven Dickenson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.mrchuckles.net
