CentOS 6.5 or 7 for basic intranet server? and other Q's

[Geotig]

Hi everyone,

I'm looking to set up a little server to make backups of our work in progress thesis at university, and to have a repository of papers, books, and other information that is useful for everyone. Searching for a stable solution I came to CentOS and really liked it, so it's goin to be the OS of choice, but I have a few questions (comming from ubuntu derivatives and only using desktop applications):

The machine hosting the server will be an unused Dell Presicion T7400 from 2008, with Xeon E5430 processor(s? I have to look into that) and something like 8 GB RAM that is in good shape.

- I should use CentOS 6.5 or 7?

- Can I have a 500 Gb HDD for the OS and a /tmp partition to share random big files between computers (or something like that) and a RAID 1 configuration for two 2 Tb HDD where important data is stored?

- Some recomendations on software to do this? Amanda/Zmanda for backups? With weekly (or even monthly) backups we are ok, no need to do daily backups.
And for the info repository? just a file server? ftp? network drive? something more fancy with search, a web frontend, etc etc?

- Would a small webserver for an internal wiki on how to use the server/recomendations/etc made things lag too much on the client side?

- Well, most of the time this server will be pretty idle, and would only do heavy work when doing backups. Can someone use it's extra power on iddle time for number crunching, modelling, running scripts (after being tested of course) or doing some kind of work? too complicated?

Now they see like a lot of questions, so please tell me if I have to edit this post to make it more CentOS or please point me where to move it.

Thanks!

[pkcarlisle-dot-com]

First, I am far from the server expert, but I do run a small Samba server, and here are some things I can suggest...

CentOS 6 over CentOS 7 at this time for the following reasons:

- Call it a bias, but I would not want to wrestle with Gnome 3 for no good reason
- CentOS 6 is in support for 6 more years. At that point your 2008 box will probably need an overhaul anyway

My GUESS is that a server used primarily for backup will not suffer from having a wiki. Experience tells me that you do want some sort of temperature monitoring
if it will be accessed more or less constantly

I use my Samba server to crunch numbers for BOINC with its extra resources, one copy running on the server, another copy on the client running over the server. This is not overwhelming, resource-wise. If the server is mostly for backups, you should be able to crunch numbers on it.

[AliceWonder]

Whenever I set up a server I always go with the most current version of CentOS because it gives me the most time before the OS has to be replaced.

I do prefer GNOME2 to GNOME3 - it would be nice to see Mate for CentOS (fork of Gnome 2) - but for servers I don't really use the GUI anyway even when I can.

[aks]

6.5 - why would you need 7?