[ale] Small Office Server Distro Recommendation

[Dow Hurst]

Patrick,
I use SUSE simply because of the hardware support and the ease of online 
updates.  I've never had online security updates foul up any of the 
machines I run either.  All this is in a production environment.  I 
would go with SUSE 9.3, do a minimal install, and train your guy in the 
use of Yast2.  Webmin can be used for the Samba management too, if you 
don't want to use Yast2 for that.  SUSE 9.3 will have security updates 
for quite a while so I wouldn't worry about him for a couple of years.  
The filesystem choice could be important for the ease of backups and 
having robustness.  I've used Reiserfs and tar without problems for 
years.  If you put his server on a good UPS with plenty of runtime, then 
XFS is a good choice and has excellent backup and restore utilities.  
Maybe a mirrored offsite backup server would be better than tape?
Dow