There's been a lot of noise recently about the HP Proliant Microserver HP-N36L / HP-N40L which can be picked up for circa £120 ($192) after HP £100 rebate. I think it's a cracking deal for a small low powered server running an AMD Neo CPU when you consider that there are plenty NAS boxes on the market costing a lot more than these Microservers and offering a lot less in terms of flexibility and build quality. I picked up one of these units with the aim to set up a fully fledged media centre & server running Ubuntu 11.04 (when it is released) with XBMC acting as the front end. It'll also be used to host an rsync server, AirPrint server and act as an Apple timemachine server for backups of various Macs. Out of the box it won't be able to handle HD media playback so I intend to add on various parts to get it up and running to satisfaction. Read on...
