Dungeon-Dave

Will you be configuring your root server graphically or via commands? Out of those three, ubuntu is the easiest to manage (it's a derivation of Debian, more like a "noob-friendly version of Debian"). CentOS and Debian will be the more stable and structured but can also be somewhat terrifying if you're new to Linux. I would also advise what Feedmebits mentioned: best plan and create yourself a testbed first. Many a novice user unwittingly becomes a spam relay or a zombie client joined to a botnet due to their inexperience - running a web server isn't a "set it and forget it" task, there's quite a maintenance overhead involved and it's safer to gain some skills and familiarity with both in a safe localised testbed before trying it out "for real" out in the wider net. Hopefully, by playing with your testbeds, you can form an opinion as to which more closely suits your needs then plump for that particular distro.

That's... a pretty comprehensive guide! Yeah, I was surprised to see I could run "pvcreate" against my mirror array whilst it was still being built. I created LVs, put filesystems on them, mounted them and restored data... all whilst /dev/md0 was still synchronising. Fantastic!

I'm vanishing for two weeks tomorrow - not back until Sept, really. May check in from time to time, but will be sunning in Egypt, floating down the Nile. Later, all!

Those can usually be started as a service. Look into the "chkconfig" command to see if you can set them to start at specific run-levels.

They do - what were downloadable utilities of yesteryear now come included as standard on most modern distros. Welcome to the forums, by the way!

Mmm... I'm in the process of updating some course notes to the newer Ubuntu/Fedora releases... and I'm not looking forward to it!

Mm.... I have an ASUS board in a tower I built the missus and it's now not POSTING after 6 months of use (this board WAS in constant use for 3 years or so) but I heard something about ASUS boards not having a particularly long lifespan.

In which case, you may want to look at creating a small GUI-based box first (ubuntu, mint or Fedora) that gives you some graphical tools to play with, and practise installations/modifications via a shell session on that. At some point you'll find yourself SSHing into the box (MacOS has a native SSH command, as well as being able to remotely connect to shared directories over SAMBA and NFS) and then you'll forget about the GUI desktop. At least - from a beginner perspective - you'll have a desktop to fall back to if you find the commands a bit overwhelming. Another package to consider: webmin. It permits web-based administration and can help with a lot of server management. XBMC is an application, sure, but on their download page they also list XBMCbuntu which is basically a strimmed-down version of ubuntu that runs XBMC and boots directly into it. Think of it as stripping out unnecessary stuff from XP then booting it directly into a media player... and you've got Windows Media Centre. The advantage I've got with the XBMCbuntu is that I'm fairly familiar with the underlying OS and can extend a media OS into a server, rather than turn a server into a media centre. I honestly think in situations like this that experimentation is the way to go. It can be daunting and frustrating to repeat the work several times and hit a brick wall on several occasions, but each time is a learning opportunity and you'll find you'll pick up more as you progress.

Generally, that's the way a NAS will work - but I didn't get the impression you wanted something non-headless. Just to explain that point: I've been running servers for years but mostly headless, and when I want to code something up I generally fire up an SSH session to hack away. For PHP/perl stuff, I use a graphical editor (Textpad) to edit files located on a SAMBA share then can either run them in a SSH prompt or surf to the relevant apache page. I don't actually perform any work on the server console itself. For some reason I thought you'd also be doing python/C++ stuff remotely like that, but hadn't featured upon you using the server desktop at all. In terms of a NAS recommendation.. erm.. I ain't used any myself. A friend that owned one let me SSH into it to run some monitoring commands, but it was just proving the point it was Yet Another Linux Distro. I was under the impression that a Linux-derived NAS OS would have underlying package management facilities - if you find one that uses CentOS then you could add packages using RPM or YUM to extend its functionality. Well, it looks like I ain't of a great deal of help there. All I would attempt in your position is to try out a few NASes, not only to evaluate their functionality but also build a plan of what I could have, prioritise what I'd like and shortlist those with limiting features. I realise this could take some time and effort, but I know I'm one of those people that - in the past - would spend time and effort building my own file/print/media server only to discover there's a distro out there that has it all inbuilt for me. (I found the same thing with XMBC). Good luck with your project - be interested to see how it progresses!

Okay... bit confused here. Let's take these two statements: "I am looking to set up a home NAS/media/file/backup server. I want to be able to do other things with the system on occasion, not continuous, i.e. development, etc." In those circumstances, I would have plumped for one of the readily-available NAS distros that's built around a familiar distro then look at extending its functionality. I'm in the process of building an XMBC machine then dropping additional server packages (apache, pure-ftpd, sshd, postfix etc) rather than build a server and shoehorn XBMC onto it. However, in your second statement: "I dont want a dedicated NAS OS." .. kinda goes against that philosophy. I suppose the first point I need to clarify is: what will be this machine's core function if you want it to work like a NAS but don't want to use a NAS OS? Secondly.. for some packages off the top of my head (well, my choice of packages): LAMP stack + cacti for doing some web-based configuration and server monitoring suitable environment for the programming language of your choice (which languages, BTW?) some MTA for server alerting fail2ban, logwatch - usual monitoring stuff sickbeard, XBMC, shoutcast, hellanzb - something for sourcing TV series and the like Lastly... welcome to the forums!