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I am a programmer by profession. I have been asked by a friend of mine to help set up open source based network infrastructure elements for his company's branch office that may have up to 50 people. Since I do not have practical experience in this, I tried looking up guides that helped in understanding and setting up infrastructure for small offices. However I could not find any such guide. As I understand, I need to have a router ( possibly from vyatta), a firewall(iptables?), switches (vyatta again), openvpn for remote access. monitoring tools (nagios) I did find this http://www.zentyal.org/ but not sure if this is useful. This was interesteding but it comes laterhttp://tboxmy.blogspot.com/2010/02/why-would-small-office-switch-to-open.html.

I am hoping that hte community here will be able to provide some pointers. Thanks

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I strongly caution you and your friend against going on some holy vendetta against commercial solutions. While the F/OSS community certainly has some winners available, the CapEx of a network is rarely a significant portion of the TCO. – Chris S♦ Nov 28 '11 at 16:11
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closed as not constructive by jscott, MikeyB, ewwhite, ErikA, Iain♦ Nov 28 '11 at 16:14

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You've taken the first step down the wrong path - i.e. defining the solution before defining the problem.

What services do you need to provide to this branch office? Enumerate those, then search for a solution.

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