Finally, my file and media server is online. Its name is chronicle (of course), and it runs a minimal FreeBSD with services for only ssh (for remote management) and slimserver (for entertainment). There is no keyboard or display, and it is set to automatically power on after an outage, should one occur.
The final hurdle is to get my music actually onto chronicle — I rip on klaymen and transfer to gb where we have oodles of storage, but the ftp program in my minimal installation only supports single-file transfers. That gets tedious really fast.
For now it only has 80 gigs of storage (not counting the 20-gig system drive), which is not exactly meeting my needs seeing as how my nearly-completely-ripped music library currently weighs in at 97 gigs — and that’s just flac; I haven’t yet transcoded to ogg. Oh, and there’ll also be a few gigs worth of photos.
I’ll be looking to invest in one or maybe two big (250gig?), cool, silent, dependable ATA disks. Any suggestions that will match all of those?