hey guys,

i got a small problem here it goes -- hope you guys can help --

we as the IT dept of this company is not very familiar with Unix/Linux. all our os is win2k or xp. so where is the problem?

well we have a ftp server in a remote location (dedicated server withthe isp ) since its our server .. we can use PCanywhere (norton) to access it remotly as in we can restart / view our desktop anything we want. but since the ftp server gets wacked by four survailance camera(those cameras upload 5kb per second each) from 8 am to 3PM and it keeps on going down, we want to try our luck with a linux server i was thinking about mandrake 9,

any way the problem is as such ... i need to make sure if something happens i need to access it remotly just like i would from my win2k machine to the win2 svr in the remote site with pcanywhere..

so in breif if i gotyou confused any where.... i need to access from a win2k machine to a linux server on a diffrent location ... i have a live ip on both sides backed up behind a firewall i can map ports anything as such

for remote access you should find ssh more than adequate, you can even run X11 through it if you need a GUI

First off not to start a distro war, but I am not sure I would use Mandrake, it seems to be more of a personal desktop distro, you could go with Redhat or Slackware, totally your choise though.

Most servers do not have a gui running so a product such as PcAnywhere is not going to do much good there. You would just have to command line in with ssh, I use a program called putty for windows to command line into my linux servers. Also you could do most things admin wise in a great program called webmin www.webmin.com You can do most administrative tasks right through your web browser.

As for performance I think the linux will win hands down, I have a cache server running that had 4000k/s at least running through it steady and it has been up over 2 months without a reboot or any maintenence ( I need to get a couple of patches on it now though :-)

Hopefully I have helped in some way.

You will be able to ssh into the Linux box using the win32 putty client. That will give you console access. If you want to access X with your favorite window manager running you could use a program called vnc to see the graphical stuff.