Jerry: Thankyou for a complete section by section response. Sorry if you got multiple mailings. Apparently the SuSe Lists SERVER gets hostile if the email exceeds 20,000 bytes and that's total overhead. I do appreciate your reply, it also demonstrates that you know how to "read" and read from a technical standpoint. Many people simply discard a written communications because they are not up to intellectually dealing with anything that initially seems complex. So thank you for making this effort. I like very much your suggestion of Alice which I think is on the 9.1 SuSe distribution. One thing I maybe did not make clear. TELNET has associated with it a client/server packages. It is possible for a computer to be a TELNET client but not a TELNET server. Same is true of a lot of packages. When I used the word server I was not referring to a web server but to servers in general such as TELNET, FTP, NFS, etc. Clients ask for services. Servers provide these services. So that is what I meant. However, you are correct in saying that I want a fully functional machine in every Linux machine with some exceptions. And here again, you mentioned ALICE would hanle differences between SERVERS (in the sense of a web server or data base server, etc.) But it would seem that ALICE could treat my machines as such SERVERS (like on a SERVER farm) and that would accomplish my objective. Most of my LAN problems are not with Linux but rather with MS operating systems. I have to run Anti Virus stuff on real time, email, and system scans and they consume a lot of bus bandwidth.. And every improvement coming from Microsoft turns the machine into a slower than before slug. I have a list of complaints far too numberous to set out here. My remark about DISKs was meant to convey that I would save the old Linux 6.4, 6.2, Slackware, etc. Linux systems on their old disks (hard drives) which would simply go into storage. (I could reuse them if necessary by reinstalling them but that would only be necessary if there was a problem with the 9.1 installation on the NEW hard drives.) Hopefully they would not deteriorate in storage. Maybe it's not a good idea. But for sure I would put the 9.1 distribution for each machine on NEW hard drives as you suggested. Regarding RAID. I got burnt using RAID. I have a Linux machine which is both WEB SERVER and DATABASE SERVER and it had RAID. Can't remember the details. The CPU was AMD and frequently crashed. I did not understand how to technically manage or interact from the command line with RAID. I was afraid of it to be honest. I turned the problem over to a consultant and he also was unable to deal with it. So we ended up just using the hard drives in a conventional manner. I realize that is not a good excuse and one day I will have to get better educated and skilled regarding RAID. The kernel on that machine was recompiled to accommodate the software RAID function. That's all I remember about it. THANKS again for your reply and for taking the many hours to do so. TED