[Slashcode-general] Which distribution should be used for a new Slashcode install?

[Dave A. <dav...@ct...>]

Folks:

Some of you may know that I run two Web Sites based on older versions of
Slash that I ported away from Apache.  The sites are CTDATA.com and
RCNJ.org.  I want to add one or more additional Slash sites to my
company's portfolio, but I am concerned about the scalability of our
existing facility and our Slash version.

I picked up a VA Linux FullOn 2x2 (I think the model is now known as a
2150) for a song.  The machine has a pretty fast CPU, a 512M of RAM, and
a good amount of disk space in RAID 5.

I want to use this as my Slash server and migrate my existing Slash
sites to Fry.  The question is: what distro should I use?  I have about
a year's experience running RedHat 6.2 on my laptop, and I successfully
installed Bender on it as a test about 6 months ago.  I don't want to
use the distro that VA made for its machines (RedHat-based), because it
won't be aggressively improved.

I am considering RedHat 7.x because it seems to have the most
documentation and third party support.  I know some people in this group
like Debian a lot, but I'm not sure what the tradeoffs are, compared to
RedHat.

What do you guys think?  Are there any issues with running RedHat 7 that
would make it difficult for me to get things up and running quickly?
Does anyone think that running Slash on a Bastille-hardened machine
would be difficult?  How much would Bastille help me keep the box
secure?

Sorry if I am rambling,

Dave Aiello
CTDATA