His boss will probably chuck a spaz if he mentions money _after_ convincing him Linux is the way to go
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Why are you going with Linux anyway? Trying to make ourselves indisposible are we? Well done
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To answer your question, Debian or Slackware are excellent choices. Debian is the best distro that I've used though, by far.
I don't know why vsftp has seemingly become so popular, I loved proftpd in my ftp admin days. I presume that it's still around... oh good, it is.
I have no idea about webmin, but file based is easy enough, of course you don't want the opposition learning too much about our niche now do we?
