Hi... My question is quite simple, but probably difficult to answer... I'm actually starting a new huge project, which is a complete rebuild of our huge 'intranet' server, actually based on Netscape Server. The new server may be as 'free' as possible... Zope seems to be the best free product actually available for us, to handle the huge amount of documents we have to share, and what I actually need is a few advises and best practices, as : - is there a "prefered" or "best working" operating system to run Zope servers ?? I may have to choose between a Debian GNU/Linux server (SMP on Intel) and a Solaris server (on Sparc). I've read here and there several messages talking about problems with Zope on Solaris, are they always true ?? - as we also have a few applications to share, which can't be handled by Zope before several weeks, is there a best way to combine Zope and Apache ?? mod_proxy, mod_rewrite, pcgi, fastcgi, virtual hosts ??? What are the benefits and drawbacks of each of them ?? - as our needs are rather simple, and may just include customization and improvements to standard products, are there any benefits or drawbacks to write our new products as ZClasses, instead of full Python written products ?? Are the performances of each other equivalent ?? - as we may quickly have a large amount of documents stored in our Zope database, is it a better practice to store everything into the ZODB, or to make Zope handle only metadatas and store real documents into external objects (by using products like ExternalFile, for example) ?? I'm a little afraid when thinking of all my files stored in a single Zope database, and I think that storing documents externally may speed up several processes like incremental backups... As you can see, we are just starting our Zope evaluation, and so I'd really like to receive any advise or suggestion to implement Zope as well as possible... Thank you for any advise or comment, Thierry P.S. : please be kind to answer to this mail directly, because I had to unsubscribe from this mailing list for professionnal reasons... :-((