On Wed 20 Dec, kevin.taylor@powerconv.alstom.com wrote:
A general note: It is advisable to run as little on your ISP connected box as you can get away with - so I would recommend that you don't use the same machine as you are using for Samba if possible.
Yes - and No. It depends what your priorities are. For 'security' there is definately a potential problem if your 'firewall' machine is also running as a server (be it web, samba, or other) as it allows external users access to it. Of course - you may decide that you would like external access to your servers from home. As far as 'loading' is concerned you would need a very slow linux box and a hundred or more busy PC stations before I would start worrying about impact on performance.
The ideal situation is a single machine doing firewalling/NAT with other services on other machines - but this is probably more for larger configurations.
We have considered separating our NT mail and proxy server simply to guard against losing both if one fails. Generally Linux is regarded as more stable so this should not be a problem. -- Alan Davies Head of Computing Birkenhead School