Home Network, my next level up!

[imported_GLO]

At the moment i run a number of PCs off my Home Network.

I was looking at theAsus WL500g Premium wireless which has some great features such as torrent downloading, and Network Attached Storage.

But i since learnt that these units are horribly slow with Torrent files, and as a file server.

The i looked at dedicated NAS, and i thought what happens if i want to add more space later.

So this idea has spawned into a dedicated very small server, with plenty of ability to add more storage as required.

I want to build a webserver cache/proxy server so that info can be sourced faster locally and to also reduce data usage for frequently visited http: site and ftp sites. (Squid Proxy server comes to mind)

File, photo and music server.

I'd like it to be able to handle my downloads using utorrent and shareaza.


As well as automatically backup data from some of my PCs.

Possibly add a mailserver too! So that my internal mail doesnt have to go via the internet. (this is very low priority)



Is this feasible? I'd imagine so.

I was/am tempted by the HP e-Vectra but that only holds a single HDD.
Otherwise I like the Masstige-25 or the iCute S901-5G1

I have a Windows Exchange 2003 licence, but im not sure if this is better setup using a *nix variant.

What would be a the minimum spec cpu and ram for this type of server setup? (note: standard cpu cooling will be used, so cool and quiet is the objective)

What input do you have? And have i missed anything?

Thanks

 

[n0cmonkey]

I always cringe when I hear about people putting all of these services on the same machine. It's a security nightmare.

If you go with an AM2 based amd64 or some of the newer Intel processors you can get some good speed with virtualization (mmm virtualization in hardware...) and put some of these services on different installs all on the same hardware.

EDIT: although squid by itself can be relatively hardware intensive, depending on how much use it ge ts.