Hi i plan on using a spare computer as the gateway for our internet connection, it will mainly act as a router and obviously therefore a DHCP server, however I had wondered about the idea of making it a proxy server as well, except i am not sure on what the benefits of this would be and how to go about it, I am open to use any Distro of linux but I would like to employ a secure firewall and some linux antivirus (just incase some idiot decides to start writing viruses for UNIX/LINUX)

I really need pointing in the right direction, and would love some detailed guidance

Hope to here somthing soon,
binary

some of the benefits of including a proxy in your install is that you'll reduce bandwidth usage and increase web surfing speed, while also gaining more control over what kinda sites your LAN users can connect to...

as for the antivirus, if you have a windows network then it's actually a good idea to have antivirus scanners on your gateway (as long as your gateway's hardware is powerful enough so as to not cause too much lag), as you can stop viruses from getting into (or going out of) your windows network that way... as for the unix/linux viruses, truth is that the "idiots" have already done this several times in the past... there's tons of threads here at LQ about this popular topic and IMHO it would be best if you would read through them instead of starting another virus discussion:

http://www.google.com/search?&q=anti...xquestions.org

http://www.google.com/search?&q=viru...xquestions.org

i can recommend dnsmasq for your dhcp and dns daemon, and squid for your proxy cache:

http://thekelleys.org.uk/dnsmasq/doc.html

http://www.squid-cache.org/

they are both very simple to setup...

as for the antivirus, there's several paid solutions, but the popular choice is clamav, which is free:

http://www.clamav.net/

look in their third party tools section and you'll probably find a nice gateway-oriented solution to hook-it-up with:

http://www.clamav.net/3rdparty.html#pagestart

BTW, the latest development versions of dansguardian (web content filter) actually come antivirus-enabled:

http://dansguardian.org/

just my ...