As a weekend project, I set out to turn a VIA Epia 800 into a Linux server.  I felt bad seeing it collecting dust on my shelf, and figured it would be nice to have a network file + FTP server.  Plus, it was a good excuse to play with linux for the first time.  It's really nothing special, I just didn't have a good case to put the server in, and beer box seemed like a funny thing to use (and appropriate, for a college student), being cheap and easy to chop up.

The hardware is a 30 gig HD, VIA Epia 800, 256 megs of SDRAM, 5.25" plextor CDRW, and a gigantic 500W power supply.  Clearly, this is FAR from being the ideal set of hardware for a lightweight server, but I put it together with what I had lying around at the time.  Eventually I'll put in a much smaller (sub-200W probably) power supply, run linux from a small laptop HD, and have a much larger drive for file storage. 

It ran Ubuntu 6.06 desktop edition, a samba file server, and a simple FTP server.

One interesting thing of note, is that the beer box was also big enough to fit a micro-ATX board I have; so if you have a micro-ATX board (which is of course more common than a mini-ITX) you can probably still do this.  In fact, if I could actually find a pair of small enough power supplies, it MIGHT be possible to fit both a micro-ATX and mini-ITX system in there together, one on each side of the box, depending on how much space was needed for any PCI cards.  Another option might be actually stacking the mobos on one side, with the ITX sandwiched between the ATX board and the wall.

After just a few days, I tried installing a more suitable distro of linux for a server, ubuntu server edition, and it failed to boot after install.  I tried installing a couple other distros, with the same result.  Arch linux gave me an error message something like "extremely broken BIOS detected", which leads me to believe my epia 800 board is toast.  I tried different hard drives, CDROMs, let it run memtest86 for a couple of hours, and even tried re-flashing the BIOS, all to no avail.  So, this project is dead in the water, and the server concept is being absorbed into my new project, setting up a combined media box + file server, running ubuntu on a much faster computer (~2GHz, 256MB RAM), but I am keeping this around because I still really like the idea of sticking a computer in a beer box, and if another spare mini-ITX mobo falls into my lap in the future, I just may do it again.