Hi all,

I’ve spent the last week or so looking around for a distro to provide the services in the subject title & turned up quite a few floppy based systems, but nothing that seems to do all of the above.

Here’s my situation, I have a small LAN with 4 computers permanently connected, plus two laptops that occasionally connect into the LAN – wired not wireless connections.

I have a broadband connection, routed through a small router with built in USB print server. All PC’s & laptops run XP & have static IP’s.

I want to replace the router with a dedicated Linux box, I was going to use some old kit I have knocking about, but have ordered a VIA EPIA V10000 Mini ITX main board, plus ITX case, slim line DVD drive, floppy drive, 40 gig hard drive & 256 meg of ram to make a small, low power ITX Linux box.

I’d like the Linux box to act as a router/firewall for the network connection to the broadband modem. Plus, provide print server services to the internal network. On top of that I’d like to install some sort of web server for my internal LAN (intranet) as two of my kids are doing web design & I’d like to provide them with somewhere to upload & test their sites away from public view &, without using up bandwidth! Oh, & not forgetting, I need to be able to VPN out to my company in order to check email, plus allow the kids to use MSN & Yahoo messengers, eMule/BitTorrent clients & the all important on line gaming! Phew, quite a shopping list eh?

I understand that in general people don’t recommend using a dedicated Linux based firewall/router as a server for other things, but hey, it’s only a home based network & everything stored on the box will be backed up elsewhere, should it get compromised & trashed!

So, I’m looking for help, suggestions & a starting point

I would use debian. Maybe stable(woody), or sarge is getting stable quite soon.
It is easy to maintain and update, kernel has ipsec contained by default.