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Red Hat Enterprise Linux:  Perhaps the best known of Linux server distros, RHEL has a reputation for being a solid distribution ready for the most demanding mission critical tasks -- like running the New York Stock Exchange for instance. It's also backed by  Red Hat's  best-of-breed support. The downside? While Red Hat is known for offering customer service and support that's second to none, its support subscriptions aren't cheap. Some might point out, however, that you get what you pay for. Cheaper third party support for RHEL is available, but you might want to do some research before going that route. CentOS:  Anyone who likes RHEL but would like to avoid shoveling money to Red Hat for support should take a look at  CentOS,  which is basically an RHEL fork. Although it's been around since 2004, in 2014 it became officially sponsored by Red Hat, which now employs most of the project's developers. This means that security patches and bug fixes a...

One of the first things to do when setting up a new system is to mirror your boot disk. This protects you against system disk failures: If one of the two mirrored boot disks fails, the system can continue running from the other disk without downtime. You can even boot from the surviving mirror half and continue using the system normally, until you have replaced the failed half. At the currently low prices for boot drive sized disks, this is a no-brainer for increasing your system's availability, even for a home server system. Unfortunately, the steps to complete until you're running off a mirrored ZFS root pool are not yet a no-brainer. While there is a piece of documentation entitled  How to Configure a Mirrored Root Pool , it only covers how to add a second disk to your root pool, it does not cover how to prepare and layout a fresh disk so Solaris will accept it as a bootable second half of an rpool mirror. Which, for historic reasons, is slightly more complicated than...