Mad Skillz

What frustrates me most about this problem I'm having is that I'm a fairly technical guy. Although I'm in management now, I have much experience in system admin - not in Linux but instead on Windows desktops and servers, and on Unisys mainframes. Working in a small shop, I was system admin, DBA, and application programmer for 15 years. I hired a self-taught network admin, and the two of us handled a 400 user network with a pile of Windows servers (plus a NetWare box or two). There was even a Unix box in there somewhere. (Also, one generation of the mainframe was built on a couple of EISA cards plugged into a Unix host. The last one ran entirely in emulation on Windows 2000 Server.)

Anyway, although I'm a Linux newbie, I have some skills.

On another note, I've been looking around at new hardware on the web, and I stumbled across these mini-ITX systems. I can see mounting one of these on the wall in my laundry room. (I've been thinking of putting a wiring/server closet setup in there.) I can appreciate the low power usage, and the simplicity of it all. There's just enough room for the hard drive - all I need. However, I'm not ready to spend the $250 for case, motherboard, CPU, and memory. As long as the hard drive space holds out on the old server, I'll keep plugging away.