I happened to find the little Shuttle above on sale at NewEgg and grabbed it up. I’ve been playing around with NAS solutions for awhile and wanted to take one of these, put in a AMD64 5300+ chip, 4g of memory, and make it into something a bit more memorable. Lets face it; these things are cheap these days folks. But what can you do with one? Well, Ubuntu Gutsy goes on one nice. The external eSATA ports all work. I plugged in an external cabinet with two 500g SATA drives smashed into a raid array and whammo! This can be more than just a server if you want. I’m considering replacing my aging mail server with one of these too. Size, heat, noise.

The ad says recertified but I had purchased a separate AMD64 chip and 4g of memory. Pretty good deal for a smal form factor PC that’s whisper quiet and that can do good duty as a variety of things. I used it for file server, desktop, NFS, Samba, Firefly, internal web server. Its the guts of the world-class infrastructure here

Best of all it all works with Linux very well. I got the networking, RAID/eSATA, wired network, USB all working first attempt.

Very nice.