Although it is a small sample group, the results seem pretty clear thus far.
I would be interested to hear what flavours people are using.
Personally, I use, in this order of percentage use, Win2000 workstation, Fedora (FC8), Slackware (11+12) and Windows 2000 server.
My pentest platform is primarily FC8 with Win2k VM.
Anyone else care to share?

Wow, you got a gentle reception in here. You have not come up with the latest and greatest crypto ever. You have not come up with crypto: it is, at best, obsfucation.
If you want anyone to take your crypto seriously, post the algorithm. Post it to sci.crypt on Usenet. I would suggest reading sci.crypt achives before you do if you've never been flamed before!
A dozen or so characters will probably stand up to crack attempts. If you were to create many, or large messages using your 'encryption' it would almost certainly fail to maintain confidentiality.

If you have specific questions, ask them but be warned: you'll likely get specific answers - it is unlikely you will get a hand-hold without doing some background research first.
Your example concerning hardware. That's a pretty big subject right there. Do you have an example of a piece of hardware and exactly what you want to know about it? Do you need to be able to look at a keyboard and work out how it converts each keypress into a signal which it sends to the computer? Do you need to look a a SCSI card and understand how it requests information from a hard disk drive and passes it to the other components connected to a motherboard?

Maybe I'm strange but I quite enjoy the SE side. Maybe it's because I come from a service background and enjoy meeting the customers.
Maybe it's because I blend well and I don't believe I look like your stereotypical computer geek or computer security geek - that makes it easier.

But the general comments here are correct - SE is probably the easiest way to get into a system or at least to get close enough to get into a system!

As for getting into a client site, don't aim for the server room. Aim for other parts of the organisation and include the server room if necessary. If you can get access to a live network port, you're 90% there anyway.
Sometimes, using a toilet just off reception can get  you the access you need - you might be suprised the route ethernet cables take - access is often just a ceiling tile away...

If price is not a factor, neither would be quantity. Not one computer would tick all the boxes.

It came just after the lockpicks.....

But I like the handcuffs idea!

My Kit:
Dell D840 with 3x HDD caddies, 1xWin2K, 2x Linux HDDs. Laptop modded slightly to allow an external Wifi aerial.
2 x USB to IDE/ Mini IDE/ SATA connectors.
2 x 500GB 3 1/2 IDEs
1 Omni and 1 Cantenna directional aerial
1 PCMCIA SCSI card with adpaters from 50 way SCSI to SCA 80 way
1 3C589 NIC
2 x 10MB Fibre-CAT5 media converters
2 x 100MB Fibre-CAT5 media converters
2 x 1GB Fibre-CAT5 media converters
8 port Dell 2708 Power connect configured to repeat traffic on ports 1-4 onto port 8
various CAT5 cable
various Fibre optic cable
2 x BNC T-Pieces and some coax.
Mini USB mouse
Lock picks
Hacksaw
Jewellers screwdrivers
2 x No. 1 crosshead (posidrive) screwdriver.
Gerber knife
Wire strippers
Various USB connection leads
USB dvd burner
CD case with Installs and live CDs and a smattering of small capacity 2 1/2 HDDs, just in case.
Notebook
Mobile Phone and charger
Analogue 'butt' phone.
Various power leads, 4 way power strip.
RF video camera. RF audio transmitter. RF video receiver. RF audio receiver.
RS232 cable and breakout box.
Crocodile clips.

This all fits in my laptop bag except the directional Wifi aerial. The bag is VERY heavy when full.

I took my CISSP with Firebrand, my C|EH and also my C|HFI (although it was TrainingCamp at the time)
The fact that I went back there twice already and plan to return for my ECSA/LPT (Just awaiting funding approval) should speak volumes.
As long as you are comfortable with the bootcamp style, it will probably suit you. Don't expect a party, expect a pass.

A bit convoluted, but here goes.
You'll have to cast your mind back several years.
I created a file called 'ver', just like the old MS-DOS command, it printed the version string for MS-DOS 6.22 when 'type ver' was issued, so 'type ver' was placed into the autoexec.
The file ALSO used ANSI commands to remap the 'S' and the 'D' keys, to swap them around. I also prised the keycaps off the keyboard for the 'S' and 'D' keys and swapped them so when the 'S' key was pressed, an 'S' was displayed and the same for the 'D' key.
To all intents and purposes, the system worked fine but the user was convinced he had forgotten the keyboard layout as usual typing produced very wrong results but if he concentrated on which keys he was tapping away at, all was well.
To add to the confusion, when Windows 3 was started, the keymappings reverted back to the original configuration as Windows bypassed the ANSI driver.

shawal, you are correct, of course. The latest kernel source will probably compile for the older hardware. You must be aware that some functionality is removed from newer kernels that may be useful for older hardware.
I suggested an older distro as the HDD and memory requirements tend to be smaller with the older distros, esp. when it comes to things like X!
I've looked at the LFS documentation, it doesn't appear to be a fun thing to do! Since I cut my teeth on the 31 floppy install of Slackware 1, I think I'll give it a miss.
I also suspect that xubuntu would not be one of the best distros to use to learn about Linux distros, less so on a workstation with 192MB ram but since I've not used it, I can't say for sure.

iSmith,

Before you go ahead and install the latest distro, you may find an older distro will be more appropriate.
For the sort of hardware you are talking about, I would go for something like Suse 5.3, Redhat 5.2, Slackware 3.6 or Debian 2.0, all circa '98. It might suit your hardware a little better.

I can't comment on the V3 CHFI. I sat the V2. The exam.
I found the exam to be very straightforward, there was a higher than expected concentration on the legislative side of things which annoyed me as the course concentrates on US legislation and I am a Brit!
Compared to the CEH, the CHFI, at only 50 questions, was a good deal easier. I completed it in an obscenely short time. I say easier but I had concentrated on the legislative aspects prior to taking the exam.

In addition to pseud0's questions:
Does your firewall allow connections out initiated by the server?
What web server are you running? Is it up-to-date?
What hosted apps do you have? Any cgi stuff? Up to date? Commercially available? In-house?
Any database?
Are workstations/ other servers on the network segment similarly affected? Have they been scanned? Are they clean?
Do you have any suspects (external or internal)?

From this point on, it's all about the logs, if you have them. Without logs it's likely to be a guessing game.

If you want a full investigation, you might want to take a bit copy of the HDD prior to rebuild. If you were planning to use this as evidence for prosecution, get legal advice or enlist the help of a professional computer forensics company although it may already be too late.

iSmith,

The problems of RAM retention are nothing new - this has been known of for a while. Only recently has proof-of-concept been made public.

It is very dependant on at attacker gaining physical access to a machine soon after shutdown and either being able to freeze the memory or transfer it to a test machine pretty quickly. It would be unlikely an attacker would want to use the original host machine for the memory recovery as some BIOSes clear the memory at system startup and booting an OS, however small, would overwrite some memory.
So, if you're worried about this, ensure you have a second boot partition/floppy/cd/usb that has a memory purge application or sit and wait a couple of hours for the RAM to dissapate fully.

Related, has anyone thought about modding a DIMM holder to provide a voltage and refresh clock in order to transport the memory and have it retain it's content indefinitley? Who needs liquid nitrogen? Maybe this should be in the forensic thread...

You should be able to use any distro you like, live CDs, pretty much anything. Doesn't event have to be Linux - any Intel based OS will do.

I use VMware but I run server so I get the free version, you could try Microsoft VirtualPC but be warned, it is awful (in comparison)

Once you have the virtualisation software, it's all downhill from there.

As for the network drivers - I spent a long time trying several different cards under Linux until I found one that I was truly happy with, but I run natively under Linux, not inside a VM. When I was using a card that was unsupported, I used NDISWrapper which is the scheme you alluded to of using the Microsoft drivers under Linux. I have not tried this within a virtual machine but logic dictates that it should work. I defer to anyone with first hand experience or more of a clue than me!