>> Maybe I'll take another look at freeBSD. But if I find a >> Linux distro with a more spartan approach I'll probably >> go that route. > > > I seriously recommend Slackware. I like Slackware and it certainly is spartan if that's what you're going for. The problem is longevity and an upgrade path. We've got a server which has been faithfully running Slackware since 2007ish. As we looked at newer versions of software we want to run on it the list of packages we would have to compile by hand kept getting longer and longer, so we're going to move to a new server. With a Debian server from the same time period we probably could've just upgraded without any major issues. -- Michael