Michael.Coll-Barth@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
I need a little guidance, not just a set of 'do this' instructions.
Although, I won't toss those! :)
I have built a small network at home for the family using five windows
boxes and one Linux box. Currently, everything plugs into a DSL Modem
for Internet connectivity.
I would like to change this to have a Linux box ( Pentium II )
residential serve as a gateway to provide firewall and proxy services.
I suppose that it will also need to behave as a DHCP server? Will it
need a second NIC installed that will attach to a hub for the other
boxes? Is Fedora too big an OS for this? Something smaller, Ubuntu?
You can build a special purpose box out of a general purpose
distribution but its a lot of unnecessary work, and fedora's short
support life cycle makes it a questionable starting point. Look at the
smeserver (http://www.contribs.org), clarkconnect
(http://www.clarkconnect.com/), and ipcop (http://www.ipcop.org)
distributions before deciding you can do better.
In addition, it would be nice to have another Linux box ( Pentium III )
acting as a web/db/file server. I plan to use Apache and Oracle for
this. Is Samba still what I should use to store Windows files? Is
there a mature IIS 6 'clone' or drop in replacement out there? I
haven't looked for this yet, so, don't yell.
The SMEserver disro can do this too, all configured with a simple web
interface, and on the same or a different box than the internet gateway
although the canned appliance-like configs can make it difficult to
add things it doesn't include.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
