Linux

Linux is one of the greatest things to come out of the Net and anyone who disagrees is a fool or Bill Gates. The history of Linux probably does not need repeating and many people have done better write-ups than me.

I go through phases of using Linux on the desktop but mostly I tend to use it as a server operating system. It runs my website, serves my files to Windows, MacOs and Unix machines, looks after my email and anything else infrastructure related. The only time it gets rebooted is either when I rebuild a kernel or I change hardware for some reason. Apart from that, it just runs.

Desktop-wise, I currently have it on one of my two laptops and I also run Vnc on my server which allows me to have a Linux desktop, quickly and easily from any of my other machines.

Distributions I use are Mandrake or Debian, depends what mood I'm in and if I'm going through a hackerish phase. If I'm in hacker-mode, it's Debian; if I just want to build a system quickly and easily with the minimum amount of fuss, Mandrake.

In the past, I have worked on Clustered AIX systems so I thought it would be fun to try and apply some of my experience and build a Linux Cluster. Go here for what I've got working so far.

I have also used several more specialist distributions in the past;

• E-Smith - The E-Smith distribution is very easy to set-up and is aimed at serving a small business with all their server needs. Think of it a bit like NT Server SBE - but free and probably easier to set-up quickly. It has some excellent features out of the box like Windows and Apple compatible networking, a fire-wall, a webserver and an email-server; all easily configurable from a nice Web-based GUI.
• Astaro - I use Astaro for my firewall as it is much more fully featured than a lot of the other firewall distributions out there and it is free for personal use. It does full Network Address Translation, supports various VPN protocols, has various proxies including SMTP, DNS and a transparent web-proxy and it feels closer to Checkpoint's Firewall-1 than any of the competing Linux firewalls which I have used. It is administered from a web-based GUI which although at first looks a little complicated and you have to get used to defining network objects a la Checkpoint; is incredibly powerful.
• SmoothWall - Smoothwall is another firewall distribution, I used Smoothwall for a whilst before using Astaro and after a phase when I decided I was going to configure my firewall at the command line and write all my own IPTABLEs scripts. Smoothwall is easy to use and I recommend it to all of my friends who are not quite so SysAdmin savvy and may need something which is easy to configure out of the box. A nice clean web-based GUI is the order of the day.