[Sheflug] Where do I start?

[Steve Tickle <nospam [at] quarndon.co.uk>]

Can you let me have some (sensible) suggestions on this please?

We currently run a mostly Windoze network of around a dozen PCs here. We 
have a dialup account to our ISP which is done from a Win95 based box 
running a firewall/proxy server which also handles mail forwarding. The 
reason behind us still using this system is that although it's a little 
inflexible and doesn't do everything the way we want it, it's reasonably 
easy to configure and I have a working familiarity with it. Ideally, I'd 
like to replace this with a Linux system but I don't know the first thing 
about the principles behind firewalls etc nor have I any first hand 
knowledge of procmail/sendmail etc.

I'm willing to read up on all this but I also need a "victim" system that I 
can gradually configure and learn on. Would it be practical to set up such 
a system although it would be on our internal LAN and hence behind our 
firewall, so that I learn the principles involved and eventually configure 
a "safe" system that could ultimately replace the Windoze box.

I should add that we currently use an ISDN2 dialup and our ISP gives us a 
single mailbox for all our incoming mail (not ideal, I know). It's entirely 
possible that we may convert to ADSL at some point when our ISP makes it 
available.

All help welcomed and appreciated.

Steve


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