networking newbie

Ah, but there's the problem. NT - about a day to get set up and working (or not at all in this case!). Needs lots of hardware. Costs lots. Linux - about an hour to set up, runs on old Pentium 60's (yes, I know it runs fast even on 486 machines, but in this case a P60 was all that was around and free). Doesn't cost anything. Management - "oh, that's quite impressive. But we don't know anything about Unix, but do know NT, so we have to stick with that". Not that I'm rather stressed out at the way the computing industry blindly follows the big players round (sarcasm mode is on here, folks!) - but I run up against this brick wall time after time. People high up in a company see something as a risk unless they have to invest lots of time and money in puchasing it and supporting it - they just don't seem to feel safe if the product in question is low-cost (or free!) and runs itself without any trouble, even if such "features" are rammed down their throats. It's a very scary industry. yup, took about 30 minutes too. I got fed up with NT wanting to reboot every ten minutes, the PC taking five minutes to boot, the 32x-speed-all-the-bells-and-whistles CDROM drive taking a minute to spin up to speed before I could access it to install software... I'm sure most of you have been there! cheers Jules