Can someone point me in the right direction to set up load balancing?

[edokid]

Hey everyone, I'm a semi-beginner here. I have a strong computer background and I've used Linux on and off, last time prob 2 years ago.

Here's my background. I own my own business, and we have 2 DSL connections each 7mbps right now. I have 8 employees, and pretty much everyone connects to the 1 connection with 1 or 2 on the other. I'm looking into load balancers to combine the two to make better use of them, but they're pretty expensive, then I realized Linux can probably do that on a really cheap machine with a few NIC cards.

I did a few google searches but everything I find seems to be pretty technical. I've used Ubuntu before but just wondering if anyone can recommend a good distro that would be easy to set this up with, or even a link to a guide that's not designed for really technical Linux admins?

The other thing I'm wondering (not as important) is if I use Linux as basically my network router in my office, do I have the ability to control things like blocking out certain websites, or say for example restricting all users to only 2MB of Internet access versus using the whole thing? Since a lot of people don't listen when I say not to use streaming music sites.

I don't mind paying for something if I have to as long as it's reasonable as I am a small business. I'm mostly just looking for something that's straight to the point, like DSL connection 1 is on this NIC, DSL 2 is on the other one, and I can click and say here's my 2 connections, balance them. I don't need anything fancy or hardcore, the limiting connection speed above would just be handy but that's really the only requirements that I would have.

As a side note, I do have a Windows Server system running Dynamics CRM 3.0 which they need access to, so my load balancing requirements are really more just in regards to external Internet access.

Thanks so much everyone!

[psic]

I've not played around with load balancing yet (did fool around with clusters once) - but I think balance is one of the simpler solutions. Here's a quick how-to for it. The article also mentions LVS, which looks like it has more features and lots of documentation.