Woohoo, time for you guys to tell me how I should spend my money.

I've currently got a linux box in my study doing a variety of tasks like mailstore, webserver, local name server, NAS and most importantly a myth backend. At the moment this is an XP3200 which is really a waste as it spends most of its time sitting doing nothing but heating the room up. I also get the feeling it's probably not doing my electricity bill any favors either. So I'd like to replace it with a mini-itx based box with a laptop drive for / and a software raid array for videos, email and NAS stored in an external box (possibly hidden away, but certainly should be detachable).

I've been looking at boards on www.linitx.com and www.mini-itx.com, is there anywhere else that's worth looking at? In terms of board requirements, an abundance of USB2.0 ports and firewire is a must. I don't think I need a particularly powerful CPU as all my myth recordings are off DVB so there's no compression to be done and the data throughput isn't huge. I've got 2 DVB-T cards which I will need to use with it, I noticed linitx do a 2-PCI riser and some of the boards explicitly state they support 2 PCI devices. Other than that I'll be relying on all the on board devices. I doubt I'll run X on it but I might make use of the audio i/o later on. I suppose gigabit ethernet might a good thing to try and future-proof it a little bit.

So, suggestions?

I've got a mini-itx system which I boot off a USB memory stick. I hand built a tiny system which contained a kernel, busybox, freeradius and openssl to work as a wifi authenticator. Worked perfectly as that.

Previously I had tried to make the system work as a video playback machine, but the epia 6000 wasn't up to the task.

I also tried using it as a DVB-S machine but it cooked (and smelled! Probably the DVB-S card, it's an early revision and they run hot) so decided that I'd rather it didn't burn the house down!

The travla is quite a nice case, but there's not a whole lot of space in it as it contains the dc-dc convertor in the front left corner.

I removed the fan from the case, as tman said, it's pretty noisy!

I didn't try a dual PCI, but providing it's supported by the motherboard I can't really see there being a problem.

Thanks guys, the riser I looked at did have logic on the board so I assume it's doing some reasonably intelligent control line switching.

As for the case, I'm getting quite handy with the dremel and I was planning on building my own case with some big slow running 120mm fans.

Hi! A post right up my street!

I run two Mini-ITX machines - one to be my Smoothwall firewall, and the other to be my webserver, backup machine and general dogsbody. (At the moment this is running Azureus to serve my mixes, which chews up a fair bit of memory even with things pared down bit is still doable. When I get the mod_bt code working correctly then I'll run the tracker bit of it as an Apache module, which will probably have a smaller footprint.) I think they're great machines.

I used two Morex cases - a 3677 for the firewall (which has a single laptop drive - the one from my original empeg-car!) and a slightly larger 2688 for the server, as I wanted to put one or two 3.5" drives in there. I found, at least for the first one, that I had to put a 2200uf capacitor across the 12V input from the power brick in order to get it to start - it just didn't have the oomph to deliver the start-up current needed. Finding this out took about a month, sending the case back to the supplier and getting it returned, and a lot of trawling through the bulletin boards.

(EDIT): Stupid idiot, I nearly forgot. I've replaced the CPU fan on the M-10000 with a Zalman Northbridge CPU cooler. It runs a bit hotter, and you wouldn't want to run distributed.net on it all day, and you want to get the attachment and the use of heat grease right. It is definitely better to have it silent - those 40mm fans are usually bearingless fans that choke up after a while. You could probably use thermal setting resin - you're not going to be taking it off again, and you want better thermal conductivity after all. Mmmm - I should buy some.

My only observation is that even the M-10000 is not fast enough for screen work. Running Fedora Core 2, the screen draw time is very slow - windows will take seconds to redraw and drag. I think this is probably because I haven't got any video smarts plugged in and it's treating the video card as just a simple display buffer. If anyone has worked out how to get reasonable video in FC then let me know.

Running as a general network device is fine, however. It can SCP a file from one machine to another at 3MB/sec and the SSH daemon is not dragging the chain using up all the CPU time. Adding USB or Firewire drives is an excellent way to expand the thing, too.

How did you get on with this, eventually?

Paul