Best OS for an old PE2550?

[Jose-Marcio Martins da Cruz]

Brian Hughes wrote:
> New guy here,

...

> 
> But about the PE2550s, we'd like to use one of these for a light-duty  
> webserver, the other for a training test-bed for networking and such  
> for students.  We'd like to run the usual for the webserver, PHP,  
> Apache, MySQL, etc.
> 
> My question is what is the best and latest OS that will run on these  
> units?
> 
>  From looking at the docs at Dell and searching through these lists  
> an older version of Red Hat Linux would be good but I'm not sure how  
> new.  Should I consider the Enterprise server versions or stick with  
> the older RH Linux 9?
> 
> It looks like Windows Server 2003 would work, that would make the  
> campus IT guys happy, obvious blasphemy on a linux list and I'd  
> prefer a *nix variant anyway.  I've seen mention of Fedora, SuSE, etc  
> but it looks like there are more issues and/or workarounds required,  
> is that right?

Did you considered running FreeBSD on these machines ? It's muuuuuuuch 
lighter than Linux. As long you'll probably not depending on Dell 
support, FreeBSD is a good choice.

A second choice is Solaris 10. It runs fine on 2550. But you'll need 
to disable hardware RAID (on the bios), and use SVM to make software 
RAID, if needed.

With both OSs (FreeBSD and Solaris), you'll get much more performance 
than Linux, mainly with threaded applications, which seems to be your 
case. Also, you don't need to look for old releases of FreeBSD and 
Solaris - the last ones will run fine.

Regards,

José-Marcio

-- 
  ---------------------------------------------------------------
  Jose Marcio MARTINS DA CRUZ
  Ecole des Mines de Paris              http://j-chkmail.ensmp.fr
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  75272 - PARIS CEDEX 06      mailto:Jose-Marcio.Martins at ensmp.fr