Last time, we discussed which distros were going to be used in this setup.

Our nominees are BEL Server Basic (KDE), UServer 8.04 LTS, OpenSuse 11 and CentOS 5.

Situationally, we talked about what we felt were the 'keypoint' strengths' of each distro and what role we would fit them into the LAN as.

This is a small LAN, one of the purposes of using Linux as a server for our intents is to provide small/medium sized businesses an option that makes the most out of available resources. Which often means using equipment at hand or easily (low cost) gotten.

Each machine we will use will have no less than 512 MB of RAM and 120 GB hard drive. These are all p4/athlon equivalents and are very common in the field.

BEL Server Basic will be implemented as our webserver.

CentOS will take on mail server functions.

Ubuntu Server will handle authentication, including LDAP, DNS and related.

OpenSuse will handle file/print services.

All connections to the LAN will be wired, ethernet. There will be common switches used (Linksys, that sort).

There will be some non-free apps used, and HP printers as well, requiring HPLIP.

All the servers will be secured using what is currently offered on disk, as shipped, be it Bastille, SELinux, AppArmor, etc...

There has been a slight delay in acquiring the machines and space to put together this project, but it should be soon now things are coming back together.

We would like to hear from readers about their experiences implementing these distros in similar fashion, whether it be in the same server configuration or other.