Great job on the write up. Firestarter is definitely easy to use, and seems popular too. A good starter personal firewall. It's great for a personal firewall, but I wouldn't recommend it for the corporate firewall. There are plenty of simple options available for a better stand-alone firewall, such as IPCop, SmoothWall Express, Pfsense, etc., that all have great web-based interfaces, and offer many more features. »

>> No backup of OS - its easier to reload than restore > I use gentoo stage4 backup and it was lot easier to just boot with liveCD and run tar extract than installing gentoo Agreed. When I'm done building a server, and it's ready for use, I always boot it with SystemRescueCD live cd, and backup the partition table and partitions (Partimage) to a writable DVD. Takes about an hour. I can build a new replacement server in about an hour, online and ready for data restore. »

Great writeup! Thank you for putting PAM and NSS into layman's terms. The ldap books I've read never made it that clear. Keep 'em coming! »

Team OS/2! Ahhh those were the days :) I carried a small pc with OS/2 around in my car, doing demo's too... »

Any chance we'll see samba and mail support added, and managed by GOsa? :) Great write up, keep it coming! »