I have been doing IT work as a volunteer for a local radio station WTHU for a few years now.  Slowly but surely we have been moving along the technology track int he right direction.  We have a stout server in wash state that handles our streaming.  The costs for this are extremely reasonable but time have gotten tight and we have to find ways to cut costs even more.  That lead to a local vendor, Swift systems, that has kindly donated a 2u rackmount server, colocation,  power, and an unmetered 10 megabit port.  I went into Swift Systems today to install Debian onto said server.  This turned out to be quite the adventure.  Some of it was totally me..i was not familiar with Debian 5.  I’ve used several variants including the near ubiquitous Ubuntu(which I would NEVER put onto a server) but I wanted the real Debian.  The hardware issue is the cd-rom drive.  I don’t know why..but it’s sssssssllllloooowwwwwww.  Painfully slow.  However the rest of the box is very very fast.  Debian in it’s default install mode will only allow you to configure one interface at install time.  If you give it an address that does not have internet connectivity when it tries to build it’s mirror list it’ll timeout(after about 5-10 minutes) and use ONLY the cd-rom.  I found this out the hard way.  I was not going to do that.  I tried a reinstall but again was met with the sloooow cd-rom..:)  I tried to setup one interface via dhcp(so it would get a local ip) and then setup the other interface to static to no avail in the installer.  I setup the ilo with another static ip in the assigned range and will have them rack the box.  I should be able to get into the machine using hte ilo and then using hte console redirect instlal debian to the static range.  I should be able to then build the repos properly and have a working Debian install.

Why not Centos?  Centos 5 is less than 3 years from expiring.  I did not want to have to do an os upgrade anytime soon.  With Cent you have to reinstall for an upgrade.  With debian you just run apt-get and install the new version.  We will see if i can get Debian to install via the ILO.  If not i’ll go with centos and deal with the os upgrade later..:)