On February 2006 I bought a VIA EPIA ME6000 motherboard with a fanless
PSU to put it as a home server and jukebox.
My goals were: a SILENT machine, able to talk with all operating systems in my
house (FreeBSD, MacOSX, Linux, WinXP).
The problem is simple: too many hosts mean files spread everywhere and always missing, together with physycal problems:
by continously moving cables and friends I always have to ask for help to get out the web.
At the moment, I had 3 hosts at home and I am often out of home looking for something i left on my workstation
Then I decided to go for a permanent server with a public SVN repository too.
Also, I had a USB printer and an USB external disk I use for backups and I wanted it shared in an hotplug fashion together with any pendrive.
This all-in-a-file HTML HOWTO contains all my steps and link to the code I wrote.