fedora as a gateway / server

[Les Mikesell]

Michael.Coll-Barth at VerizonWireless.com 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 at gmail.com