I use FREESCO for my port forwarding/routing, works great easy to use etc...
I use a Coblat Qube3 for our email, DNS and WEB server
and I use the e-smith for a fileserver as of now..would love to use it to do everything but cant put that cool little blue box out of commision yet its doing a third of a million hits a month with no problem and looks so cool... alot of pepole think I lie to them when I tell them that little blue square box does all or web and email and dns and is only a 300mhz AMD in there... Ah the power of linux and no bloat like microcrap.... then they really don't believe me when I say it hasn't crashed or been down since we put it in almost a year ago, except for when we need to reboot for a software update or when we added a stick of ram, then when I prove it, they begin to believe me...same as the esmith, show them the server status and the speed the single processor AMD athlon, cheap 5400rpm IDE drive, $650 server is serving at VS our NT double processor PIII with scsi ect. then they begin to get interested.
Idealy having a easy port forwarding as in the FREESCO distro with the easy DNS of the Cobalt Qube and the features of the e-smith like VPN ect. would make the best server appliance distro around...well it probably is the best server distro around now but it would be even better. I could get everything done in one box instead of 3 and make the Qube into a kick ass looking test server...or a cool looking slow windows machine.
The one feature I have not seen is IP forwarding... having you public NIC have multiple IP's and bieng able to route them to internal machines...this would be great...and even a possable third NIC for a DMZ area for your public servers.... right now i just create my own DMZ using the freesco, then my public server, then my lan hanging behing the Cobalt.. works good but lots of machines to do it all but fills the needs we have greatly and the performance is very good... I even have a secound fresco dial up router as a back up if our main Internet connection goes down i can switch to a 56k dial up....no serving but we can send email out and tell others we are down and use web email like hotmail ect.. and do our credit card processing ect...so it kkep the business going in those tmes of need..and the funny thing is it a old 486...the power of linux or any *nix system.
I actualy prefer the GUI in the FREESCO system simple, kindof shell like so i guess it is the oldschool in me comming out... the esmith GUI is great simple fast and looks sweet, the cobalt GUI is slow and bloated, I really dont like it to many images.. but it does have GUI DNS stuff i like that.. and the setup on e-smith is better than the freesco system more dummy friendly almost any one could install e-smith and once you hit the GUI it is streight forware and easy to do any simple mods...if ther were some mor advanced things in the GUI it would be great such as port forwarding and DNS even if you had a gui like it is now for the main stuff and then a simple GUI for the advanced stuff like on FREESCO...i think this would be a great addition to the E-smith distro
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