[KLUG Members] Replacing "gatekeeper" and "mail beamer".

[adam]

Greetings.  I'm currently working for a company that is primarily windows
based.  They use windows for this mainly for the purpose of ease of recovery
from a failure.  Right now, they are using a program called gatekeeper for
proxying, or shall I say spying, on other users.  I believe that most people
are limited from the net during certain hours, and if they ever got it
working, they would have it caching pages.  As well, they are using
"mailbeamer" as a mail fetching/distribution program to fetch email from the
ISP and distribute it amongst the company.
My question:  I know that using squid can aid the proxying and caching, but
can one limit people's ability to reach the net during certain hours?  As
well, will sendmail/qmail do the same thing mailbeamer is doing?  I have a
hunch that it will, but I know not if it actually does.
I need to come up with a valid argument as why to use linux, esp. since the
failure recovery is a load of hoo-ey.  The person in charge of the network
has more or less a choke-hold on things, and for the most part, would hate
to lose the upper hand on things.

Can anyone help me here?  I'd like to rid that proxy machine, since it's
really lame, is really hard to add/remove people (you have to shut all
services down to add someone, close another program, then add, the open the
other program, and then resume services) and it's the slowest thing on the
planet.

Oh, well. A bit of a rant there.  I'm looking for a solution here that
doesn't involve too much "technical" stuff, so that the other guy isn't
lost, but involves the speed and power of linux.   I don't even want to
bring up the problem of his firewall.  Checkpoint firewall sucks...

AdamB