One of these days I'll probably get me a Soekris board+case. Less than 300 USD including case, power supply and shipping to Europe, and you get a totally silent (no moving parts), very small and awesomely cool computer with three Ethernet ports, one USB, two serial (for console?) and a Compact-Flash socket. All that to further reduce the level of noise in the hacking room which also serves as a bedroom for visiting friends/family.
I currently have mirador (Compaq Presario, Pentium 100 MHz/64 MB RAM) as my main gateway/firewall with the USB ADSL modem, and clodomir (trusty old 1996 hand-made Pentium MMX 200 MHz/64 MB RAM) as my, uh, server. Server for everything, actually: SMTP, IMAP (with Spamassassin and Clamav), a bit of NFS, CUPS, Samba, and web, including this blog, my Dolibarr customer management stuff, my picture gallery, and so on. It even wakes me up every morning by playing a Vorbis stream from the Internet (when said Internet is not broken), at different times each day (especially on Saturdays and Sundays).
Both are permanently up, both are in my cupboard (the shiny thing on the right is mirliton, my development box, and is powered off most of the time), and both make little noise. Yet you can hear them, and I'd like to stop inflicting that noise to my guests. Replacing mirador with that totally silent Soekris thing is the first step, replacing clodomir will probably be a bit harder to achieve. I'll take any hints (provided they point to extremely cheap solutions, thanks).
