REALLY not wanting to start a religious war, but I have a question of Linux vs BSD.
I have a client that needs a "disk server" and I was thinking that this
might be an opportunity to ask for recommendations.
As much as I love OpenBSD for the things that it is good at, I avoid it for the things that it is not good at. When it comes to disk management, Linux wins hands-down. Check out LVM. To get this kind of functionality anywhere else you'd have to give a lot of money to Veritas. And I'm doubtful that it's even available for OpenBSD.
LOTS of disk space ( SATA? RAID! )
I see from a later response that you were talking hundreds of gigs, as opposed to getting into the TB range. This really isn't a lot of disk space. But if you go the Linux/LVM route, please do plan ahead and look at your PE size. Going too small here can really put a damper on scalability of your Volume Group in the future.
At least one Gigabit Network connection
Second network connection, at least 100 MBit.
Another neat Linux trick - bonding. You can bond multiple NICs together and load balance between them. Slap two Gigabit NICs in there and address them as one. :)
This machine would be plugged into an existing network ( actually two
loops, one 100 MBit, one Gigabit, but this box is to a large extent for
the Gigabit side ) consisting of a Linux general purpose server ( IMAP,
SMTP, DNS, SAMBA, etc. ), a Linux firewall box, and a conglomeration of
Win 95, 98, 2K machines. ( also a soon to be dead ( or replaced ) WinMe
machine )
The firewall box is actually the shoe-in for OpenBSD. Linux has a neat little firewall but it's a royal PITA to master compared to pf, and if it is compromised the OpenBSD box is going to be a lot harder to rootkit than the Linux box if you do it right (there is a lot of hardening you can do on an OpenBSD box to make it much more secure than it is out of the box).
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