[LUNI] Hardware help/advice...

[Andrew Close]

hi all,

i've been outta the hardware game for a bit now.  just not up 2 date
on the latest and greatest boards and chips, so i was hoping i could
get some help/advice from the collective.  :)

my main goal is that i'd prefer to be as conservative as possible with
my power consumption.  i would like to be a green geek. ;)

i'm currently looking to build two machines.
the first will sit in a closet in the basement and will be mainly a
file-server.  the second will be a secondary use desktop.

the file-server will be a LAMP (not necessarily PHP) machine with RAID
and NFS/SAMBA used mainly for multimedia storage (NAS): central music
repository, video storage, digital photo repository, etc.  it doesn't
really need to be a high-powered (CPU-wise) machine since it will be
doing mainly storage and file serving.  this machine won't be doing
any actual display of its content, only serving.

the desktop machine will be used (secondary to my beloved powerbook ;)
for general development and other interests.  for this machine i'd
prefer something powerful enough to use VMWare or Zen to allow for
multiple instances of Linux to run so i can play with many
environments and experiment with different distros and server setups.

i'm thinking software RAID will be good enough for my current needs,
so extra cards and cheap onboard controllers aren't necessary.
onboard video is definitely fine for the file-server since it will
rarely be hooked up to a monitor.  it will most likely be fine for the
workstation as well since i don't plan on gaming or doing high end
graphics work with it.
would something like the VIA-C7 or StrongARM processors work for the
file server?  or do i need a little more power for software RAID?
for the desktop i figured i'd go with an Intel Yonah or equivalent AMD
dual-core processor.  aside from being dual core i know nothing about
either of them. :)  i don't really care whether they are 32 bit or 64
bit at this point.  by the time there is enough mainstream software
that is really in need of 64 bit processing i'll probably just buy new
hardware.  of course, that may be extremely naive, but i did say i'm a
bit ignorant on the subject. :)

so i guess the main hardware recommendations i'm looking for are
mobo/proc and power supply combos that would fit my needs as outlined
above.
am i missing anything?  any other suggestions?
thanks a bunch

andy