I have three PC's to use for my home office. I am trying to determine the best use of what I have equipment wise. I what to use one for a file, Samba and fax server. The second would a small web site server. The third would be a firewall to the Internet via DSL. The first is a PII (233) with 96 Megs RAM and a 4.3 gig hard drive. The second is a PII (350) with 256 Megs RAM and a 4.3 gig hard drive. The third is a PIII (1000) with 128 Megs RAM and a 20.5 gig hard drive. I can make equipment changes to match the requirements as needed for each machine. What I am not sure of is the RAM requirements and CPU loading for each of this job types. I am just looking for some general guide lines to configure these three machines. Thank you.

If it was me...

I would probably use the 233 for the firewall - probably with smootwall.

The 350 will be ok for a webserver and it has enough ram especially if it isn't going to be under a high load.

The last system is probably best for the fileserver as it has the largest disk, fastest processor and the ram generally isn't as important.

Hardware wise I don't think you need to change anything.

david_ross thank you for helping me a second time (see '"Swisting" samba login to do more? '). With your lead on that one I was able code a few lines of bash to do the job. Thank you again.

ps: Is smootwall a better choice than iptables that i have set up on another firewall? Thank you.

Smoothwall is a distribution specificly designed as a firewall. It uses iptables but is pretty much already after a simple install - see:
http://www.smoothwall.org

Let me know if you need any more information.