Sure . you can do all of that without a lot of trouble. Everyone on here will have some sort of recommendation, but you can easily do it with just about any old box . just make sure the power supply is good with a decent hard drive and they are good to go. I basically have + Centos 4 or 5 on a cheap refurbished HP box + use Firestarter software for the firewall because it has a gui and I got tired of writing commands for IPTables + there are easy settings in firestarter (and I am sure there are many more good firewall products out there) to set the basics . allow all outgoing, deny incoming, etc. + adding samba is a possibility, but I do not do that as I store on something else behind the firewall + I have DSL and feed directly from their system into my NIC for the outside world + I use a second NIC and a gigabit router for anything inside to connect up through Cheap, safe, simple, reliable. Randy From: tclug-list-bounces at mn-linux.org [mailto:tclug-list-bounces at mn-linux.org] On Behalf Of Olwe Bottorff Sent: Thursday, July 01, 2010 4:14 PM To: TCLUG Mailing List Subject: [tclug-list] Advice on using Linux box as router/firewall/file manager? I've got friends (really) -- who want to use an old box as a router/firewall/file server at the business. I told them Linux can do this -- all-in-one. But I've never been a serious admin type. Am I right that one box with Linux can do these things? They have a modem from their ISP patched into a Netgear Web Safe Router (RP614v3) and four Win boxes (2XP, Vista, Win7) plugged into the router. Could this router be deactivated and used as just a hub? Would file serving be done by Samba? O GM,MN -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20100701/d3ff74d1/attachment.htm