home network for computer science education?

This seems as good a forum to ask as any, so here goes.

While I'm not a newbie to *BSD and some Linux, I'm not a pro. I'm somewhat novice really.

I am a student, next year I will be going to a local university majoring in Applied Science (CS). I want to set up a good network at home that will facilitate this learning, and for my own personal laughs and giggles.

I hope to set up a network consisting of one netBSD workstation, 2 terminals (possibly diskless), a Linux server, an OS X machine, and a closedBSD firewall...

I'm unsure of which Linux distro to go with for my server, however. I was looking at LTSP (http://ltsp.org) for the software to power the terminals off of a netboot setup. Right now I run Fedora core 1, but would like to delve deeper into the world of less-friendly distros (this is about learning, after all).

My questions I pose here:

• What distro should I go with for the server?
  Does anyone have experience with LTSP or similar software and can give advice?
  Any comments on my idea?

for a good secure server build and a great learning experiance with the install (that seems to be the overall goal of this) i would look into gentoo. Gentoo not only comes with the kind of bare bones inital installation that is perfect for a server (where you dont want 100's of worthless processes gumming up your finely tuned machine.) Also the portage system (emerge) is simply brilliant, for example, you will probably be running samba on this (or nfs, whatever floats your boat) emerge samba, all dependancies will be handled and the entire program will be installed. that and a text editor may be all your server needs in witch case, your set, no extra security holes from processes that oyou dont want.

Actually, I was looking at Gentoo a while ago, but not as a server. I was reading about Gentoo MacOS and people have wonderful things to say about it as a distro in general.

personally i use slackware for my server at home and it seems to work great for me and actually i know that this site is currently running on slackware also :) so i would recommend slackware or gentoo for the server and work stations actually they are both great distros. if you are planning on having 2 workstation you could go one bsd and one slack or gentoo but they both also make good servers too :)
good luck