[ILUG] Looking for a small, quiet server device.

[Darragh]

Good morning.  

I'm very likely hoping for too much but I'm doing some work in an office that would really benefit from a small server.  

Requirements of this server are:
Something about the size of a normal residential internet router.  AS quiet as one too. 
A distribution of Linux..... obviously. 
most importantly,  easily configurable to authenticate users on windows machines. 
some kind of mail server to pull in mail from a number of pop3 servers.  Squirrelmail for remote access would be nice but not escential. 
Another very important function is a proxy. Both for regulating usage and reporting.  Squid would be great. 
If at all possible, a method of attaching removable storage either via LAN or USB would really help. 

I know I'm asking for a lot but the people I'm doing this work for are not particularly technical.  However, their requirements are expanding as they take more staff on.  Their already paying out quite a lot for more desktops so I want to keep the price of this device reasonably low and one major factor is keeping the running cost down as well.  

I've heard of projects in the past set up to build Linux distributions on very portable hardware so I'm almost sure at least some of this functionality is possible.  

If absolutely necessary, I could configure this functionality on a normal PC but I'm still not as skilled at this than most of you and I've only about two and a half weeks to get this up and running. 

Any suggestions welcome. 

Thanks



Darragh
www.digitaldarragh.com