Considering Arch For My New Home Server

My wife and I both use Arch full time on our desktop and two laptops, and we enjoy it a lot. Right now our current home server also runs Arch and works very reliably. In fact I don't think I ever had a problem with it. The server we use has some major hardware on it that would probably make it better off as a standard desktop and not a server (it has a great video card, for example) so I decided to buy or build a new server to replace it. (The current server is over four years old). The server will be responsible for SSH, Unison, DNS, and Samba.
I have decided to have three hard drives. One will be dedicated to the root and swap partitions. The other two will be dedicated to /home and will be on a software RAID1. The reason for this is because redundancy on the OS is not important to me (a Clonezilla image that I'll have stored will quickly restore the OS if I ever need to recover it) but redundancy on the data is really important since it will house all of our media (over 500GB worth). I have an offsite backup too so that's not an issue either. Also notable is the fact that the server will not have any GUI at all. Just the kernel and whatever is required to facilitate what it serves.
Anyway, here is where I'm wondering if Arch is still a good choice. My current server uses Arch and works 100% reliably, but is also not on any form of RAID either. Considering how often Arch changes, I fear that maybe an update would come along that would break the RAID, and that's the last thing I want to have happen. How reliable is Arch on a server from a RAID standpoint? I am also considering Debian, however, Debian packages rarely match the versions of our computers (especially Unison) so I don't think Debian serving an almost primarily Arch Linux household would work well.
Last edited by jlacroix (2011-02-25 17:33:08)

jdarnold wrote:It's a perfect choice and very much the way I have my server set up.
That's well and good until 12 months later when you decide you want to install new package X, which depends on lib A, which means lib A has to be updated, but packages Y, Z, R, T,W,Q and V all need to be updated because they also depend on lib A and you end up with a big borked box.
Yes, experience has learnt me that
There's always ArchServer (Full Disclosure: I'm the project coordinator )
Last edited by fukawi2 (2011-03-18 13:05:53)

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