Red Hat Queries

[quest]

Hi,

I am thinking of moving to Linux and Red Hat seems to be the obvious choice however they seemed to have supporting it and I have a choice to pay for it (Is it Red Hat or has it become RedDows) or download Fedora. Now a few questions.

1) If I install and run Red Hat 9, can I still get updates as easily?
2) What are my choices as I am a Windows expert but a Linux noob as far as setting up a server? What should I consider? Is there a guide I can follow for word-for-word on setting up secure linux servers?
3) Should I install KDE since I'm short of time as the company I work for wish to move ASAP? What are the risks?
4) How can I harden the servers apart from using Bastille?

I guess I could go on asking multitude questions but you get my drift. I'm a complete newbie to Linux and need as much help I can get on setting up secure web and mail servers?

[andutt]

On http://www.tldp.org you hva many useful howtos. But you can do a bunch of things to make mail and webservers more secure then win-server.

1:Close a unessasary services
2:Remove all unessasary packages
3:Create chroot-environments for you webb-services
4:Use iptables for filtering connections and ports.
5:Use a security software to strengthen security like:Pax,Grsecurity or something.