New Server Hardware Recommendations?

[Shane Hathaway]

Nicholas Leippe wrote:
> Not if it's a *personal* server for his home lan... his local 100Mb/GigE is 
> going to outperform anything crossing his DSL/cable connection hands down.

Right.  I have both, a home server and an externally hosted virtual 
server.  The external server is better for hosting web sites, while the 
home server is better for unusual stuff like:

- Participating in 30+ mailing lists (procmail helps a lot)

- Running buildbot (on multiple virtual server configurations)

- Hosting a VPN

- Running Windows inside a VirtualBox VM, inside a TightVNC server, for 
business accounting software.  The Linux choices don't handle taxes. 
The VNC service is accessible anywhere on the VPN and quite responsive 
when you use "-encoding tight -bgr233".

- Providing a gateway to my home network so I can fix stuff remotely for 
my family.

- Storing a photo archive of 50+ gigabytes and growing.

- Miscellaneous experiments involving potentially crash-prone or bloated 
software.

Of course all this stuff creates the need for a good home backup 
strategy.  I have 2 large USB drives and I use rdiff-backup to update 
the backup.  At all times, at least one of the two drives is in cold 
storage offsite and I rotate them every few weeks.

Shane