I am getting tired of compiling and recompiling lots of packages over and over to keep my system up-to-date. Because there are no binary packages (except for openoffice, mozilla and a few others) in Gentoo with every update you end up compiling the whole thing again and again. The compiling and installing of packages is really 'pushbutton', but I don't like the fact that my server is compiling something or the other half of the time just so that my system is up-to-date. That is the reason I am switching back to Fedora. They have reached release 2 by now. So I just installed Fedora Core 2 over the network on this server after backing up my data files. Everything except the photo album are up and running. This time I have only installed the 'server' configuration. That means no X-windows or desktop environment. This machine only has a text based login. However, I have another box that I use as my Linux desktop. I have installed 'Fedora Core 2' on that too, only difference is that I chose 'Workstation' install on this one. I can ssh to my server and invoke all the configuration programs in GUI mode to be displayed back on my workstation. So not having installed X-windows on server doesn't really hurt. In a way it is better for security.
I also recently switched my DSL provider from Verizon to Speakeasy. Speakeasy provides 2 static IPs. So one static IP is assigned to my server (which hosts my web/mail server) and one is assigned to my Wireless Router/Gateway. The Linux desktop is configured to have static non-routable IP address and have the wireless gateway as the default router while all the other 3 Windows desktops are configured as DHCP clients with the Linux server as default gateway. With wireless router configured to forward port 80 to the Linux desktop, now I can use both the static IP to host two distinct websites: bapat.net and amitbapat.com. I have also changed the DNS server 'A' entries for bapat.net and amitbapat.com to reflect these changes.
I am planning to have the amitbapat.com site for experiments with variaous web development platforms, while bapat.net site will serve as our family website with photo album and web based mail.
Let's see what happens.