{"id":291,"date":"2009-06-29T20:00:56","date_gmt":"2009-06-29T20:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.garfnet.org.uk\/cms\/why-is-garnet-using-linux\/"},"modified":"2024-12-06T03:05:53","modified_gmt":"2024-12-06T03:05:53","slug":"why-is-garnet-using-linux","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/garfnet.org.uk\/cms\/2009\/06\/29\/why-is-garnet-using-linux\/","title":{"rendered":"Why is GarNet using Linux?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our old server ran since 1995 with only a handful of reboots. Needless to say, it was not an M$ Windows machine. It was a FreeBSD box and it served us well. When our ISP said we could build our own server, we had two choices;<\/strong><\/p>\n

1. Windows 2003 Server with IIS (Micro$oft Internet Information Server) or
\n2. Linux with Apache webserver.<\/p>\n

M$ software would have cost an arm and a leg, whereas Linux & Apache is free. Thing is that I’m a tight-wad – the sort of guy who buys his shoes from Tescos! Therefore there was no contest here really. In fact ALL the software on our new server was Linux-based and totally free.<\/p>\n

OK, setting up Linux can be a pain – although I must say Linux & Apache was a doddle for us for reasons detailed in elsewhere in this FAQ.<\/p>\n

The tricky bit on our first GNU Linux remote server install was installing the email server – frankly QMail still seems a black art to me. Since then we suffered a couple of hard drive failures and used these as an oportunity to try different means of installing.<\/p>\n

Today we use Debian version 5. I will be publishing a guide to this later. But in a nutshell, everything we need is available by doing a simple “apt-get install ” from the command line.<\/p>\n

Once Linux is set up it is amazingly robust. And all that Unixy stuff may seem a bit scary at first but after you have worked with it for a while, you really do grow to love it. And there are some brilliant Unix resources on the web. I know true Unix geeks would balk at this idea but I found a couple of articles on the Wikipedia especially helpful in getting my head round some basic Unix concepts…<\/p>\n

1. Unix http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Unix<\/a>
\n2. Unix Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Filesystem_Hierarchy_Standard<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our old server ran since 1995 with only a handful of reboots. Needless to say, it was not an M$ Windows machine. It was a FreeBSD box and it served us well. When our ISP said we could build our own server, we had two choices; 1. Windows 2003 Server with IIS (Micro$oft Internet Information…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":26710,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_kad_post_transparent":"default","_kad_post_title":"default","_kad_post_layout":"default","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"default","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"default","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[12,6,691,28,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-291","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-faq","category-journal","category-linux","category-site-blog","category-technology"],"yoast_head":"\nWhy is GarNet using Linux? - GarfNet<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/garfnet.org.uk\/cms\/2009\/06\/29\/why-is-garnet-using-linux\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Why is GarNet using Linux? - GarfNet\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Our old server ran since 1995 with only a handful of reboots. 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