Hello Guys,

I'm planning to make 3 linux servers.

1st : Internet Connection Sharing/Web-Cache/Firewall (replacement of ISA Server)

2nd : Authentication server (Replacement of Active Directory server)

3rd : For File Sharing and Mail Server

I have 300-400 users (mostly windows clients) on my network. So I need some strong web-filtering and access control plus windows client authentication with linux server. I request you to please suggest me the distro for each and reliable software available in linux for the tasks. Thanks...

Cheers.

personally i would use either fedora or centos for the distribution

for the 1st part i would actually split into 2 servers, a smoothwall or ipcop server for the internet connection sharing/firewall and a squid server (on fedora or centos) for the web cache, the smoothwall doesn't have to be a hugely powerful machine, something that you find at a garage sale would be powerful enough

for the 2nd part and the first half of the 3rd part (the file sharing), i would recommend samba if you are going to have windows clients, possibly combined with LDAP for authentication, samba can be configured as a domain controller and also handles file sharing.

as for the second half of the 3rd part (the mail server) i would use postfix

Red Hat's bleeding edge and buggy testing ground for a server? That's rather unorthodox

perhaps, but then again those are the options offered by godaddy for their virtual server packages .

That many people could really take a lot of processing power. Might look at a hardware type device.

For software there are quite a few. I kind of liked untangle linux but there are others.