Well, finally got around to it and am awaiting delivery of a 2nd hand Dell Precision 530 workstation that I got off of eBay.

Comes with a 1.8Ghz Intel Xeon processor (upgradeable to dual), 512Mb RDRAM, 18Gb SCSI drive.

Plans so far - I've got a stack totalling 660Gb of IDE drives on my desk, so they'll be going in it first thing. Then upgrade to 2Gb and possibly 4Gb of RDRAM (though not too soon - have you seen the price of RDRAM???)

Debian Sarge 3.1 is the first to go on, upgrade to unstable and the latest 2.6 kernel, Xen 3.0 and LVM, slap a 2nd NIC in there and it's going to be the gateway machine for my home/office network.

Planning on seperating out all the machines I might need into seperate Xen instances - for example a 128Mb/20Gb instance to do transparent Squid proxying for the network.

Seeing as I'm going to be loading a lot of Xen instances, what's the best way of cutting down on the amount of traffic transferred when i debootstrap the volumes - will the Squid proxy server handle it, or should I setup a ftp/http instance and do a partial mirror of the Debian archive?

Any other comments are welcomed as well

Cheers!