I am looking at building two Mini-ITX systems, both with different requirements. I'd like to get the same hardware for both to make 'support' easier - one will be replacing an older Pentium 4 Prescott Shuttle in my parents' house. I'm looking specifically at Mini-ITX because I would like a box with low power usage that is as quiet as possible, as at least one will be in a living room. Note that the two boxes will not be located in the same place and will not (as yet) be talking to each other, so I'm not looking to combine them into one system.
On to the requirements ...
Box #1:
- SSH Server for remote access.
- XM PCR control software to tune the XM PCR over USB. This has little overhead, so it probably isn't that much of an issue.
- IceCast (or similar) streaming from line-in to send the audio to other computers in the house. This is the most processor-intensive task that has me worried about picking a good processor.
- Apache to act as a remote interface for controlling XM and accessing the IceCast streams.
- SAMBA file sharing to use as a small backup server for Windows machines.
Box #2:
- SSH Server for remote access.
- VPN using OpenVPN or the new features of OpenSSH. This would have at most 1 simultaneous user.
- irssi+screen
- Small backup server using either SAMBA or scp/sftp.
- General messing around - I am awaiting a used copy of Absolute OpenBSD.
The SSH and VPN requirements have me thinking that it might be worth getting a board with PadLock hardware-accelerated encryption. I will be picking up 1GB of memory for each system since it is so cheap. Storage will probably be a hard drive at this point - it looks like some of the Western Digital Scorpio drives are quiet. The servers will either be on 24/7 or be on during the daytime and shut down at night, then brought up again in the morning with Wake-on-LAN. I haven't decided that part yet.
Does anyone have any motherboard suggestions that will meet my requirements? Thanks
