I have just recently built a server at home for some testing. I am quite pleased with the result and the experience is worth sharing.

The machine is an IBM xSeries 335 and the specs are: dual-Xeon 2.8GHz, 3GB RAM, 80GB disk (ATA). Memory and disk need a bit of beefing up. I have managed to pick up with box and a few extras for it from eBay for a fairly reasonable price for a system of this calibre.

The plan was to pull up a Linux server which is easy to manage, slap on a VMware server then run a few VMs remotely to test some SW for my pet projects.

I have picked Ubuntu as I am already reasonably familiar with the desktop edition, I like it and it has plenty of documentation for everything you may want to do on this OS.

The pleasant surprise came with the installation of Ubuntu Server Edition 7.10 and the rest of the SW. The OS went up in less than 10 minutes and booted up with all the HW pieces recognised, another 30 mins to install Gnome desktop over the Web, 10 minutes for VMware Server and a few more minutes fiddling with the config to make XDMCP work with GDM. That’s right; it took about an hour, not more.

Now if I could only do something about the noise from the army of fans inside…