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

[Adam Tauno Williams]

>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?  

Oh, yes, and much much more.  You can build just about any type of ACL
structure you can imagine.

>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.

fetchmail and sendmail will.

>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.

Linux can give them MORE control :)

>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

Rough, "squid -k reconfigure"

>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...