I've found with Century Link, if you choose the option to disconnect service, they'll connect you to someone who can actually get you good speeds and at a good price. Kind of sad it has to come to that, but now I've got 40/20mbps DSL with a static IP without having to pay for a business account. They're only charging me $35 bucks a month, though it'll go up to $75 after 6 months. Still better than anybody else in town by far. Oh, did I mention no monthly bandwidth cap? I can't say this will be the same everywhere, since it might not be possible at that location, but they'll hook you up with a far better deal than their sales or tech departments. This should last me until the city's gigabit fiber project comes to my neighborhood in Seattle.

You really need to look past the motherboard as a whole and more at the components that make it up. Going all Intel should give you a really compatible set up. You do have to really read the specs to find out which NIC(s) the board uses, but an intel one should work great. I have had a bit of a caveat with some distros like centos on the newer intel NICs. There's an alternate driver called e1000e that will work stably with those. Distros that use newer kernels, like ubuntu should default to the e1000e driver on those, though. The problem I had with the older 1000e driver was the interface would lock up after a few days, but it was certainly good enough to get online and do initial setup and add the repo where I could get the e1000e driver.

Virtualbox is a great starting point since he's looking for something to run on windows. I have found it's performance to be lacking, but it's a good way to cut your teeth. Once you cut your teeth on the concepts of virtualization and get a bit of Linux experience, move on to something that can run on a headless machine and save resources. Virtualbox can do that, but it's actually a bigger headache to setup in headless mode than kvm or xen. KVM is super easy to set up on most distros, and there's some great guides on howtoforge.net. The trickiest part about setting up most of the hypervisors on Linux is creating a bridged network interface, which is only necessary to get the machines out of nat mode and give them IPs on the public network. It's still not that hard to set up the bridged interface, it's just that the rest of the set up is so ridiculously easy, just apt-get/yum intsall the packages with virt-manager to manage it all and you're set. At least in my situation KVM guests required less resources to get the same performance as a virtualbox guest. It wasn't too hard to convert a virtual box VM to a qcow image KVM could use, either, so you're not locked into one hypervisor.

NTP is probably a bad idea for virtualization, but most other services it's fine. You can have redundant VMs, or at least snapshot them to another host, to bring them up easily in the event of a failure. And as has been said, you can stack some services into the same instance, For example you could stick munin, mrtg and nagios on one VM. If you're serious about your monitoring though, you've got a monitoring system in there, plus one offsite. This way if the internet connection to the rack goes down, or the monitoring system in the rack goes down, you'll get notified. A distributed nagios system would work well for that. You could even get a cheap micro instance at AWS for the offsite monitoring box, or just run it from the office.

Ever since I bought this motherboard, Asus P8P67 Deluxe I had crashes with pulseaudio. Almost always if I tried to play multiple sound sources, like not stopping a video or music with you tube playing or something or running smplayer and audacious at the same time. This was under both Ubuntu, and later when I jumped to Fedora. Decided to bite the bullet and get a Xonar DSX, and no more crashes. The one thing is to configure it as 7.1 card in in the pulse settings, even if you're only using a 5.1 speaker setup, otherwise your speaker arrangement will be off. The other caveat is that the card requires a 4 pin floppy power connector. It comes with a molex adapter, though. Apparently a 1x PCI-E slot supplies less power than a PCI slot, so it needs the extra power. Nothing that can't be worked around, so I'm happy with mine. Totally worth it. I had stockpiled a bunch of old SB live and audigy cards for a long while, but since I dual boot for games, win7 didn't play as nicely as linux with those old cards. Those old EMU10k1 based chip cards were so awesome under linux. Actually had fantastic ALSA drivers that could do hardware mixing with no sound server, but don't get me started on that. I could go on all day about how the real problem with sound under linux is crappy drivers and we shouldn't need a sound server. But I digest... The xonar has been a great upgrade. I disabled the realtek in the bios, and the card was detected by fedora without having muck about with loading modules.

Install fail2ban, especially if you're going to leave SSH open. You can configure some stuff to catch common web exploit attempts as well. You can probably get configured on any service you want. It plugs into iptables and bans IPs for set time periods for too many bad logins in a short period of time, hitting certain URLs, etc. It's highly configurable for just about any service you could want to run, and you can whitelist IPs and subnets. If you're running any admin control panels, cpanel, phpmyadmin, webmin, or whatever, set it up with an htaccess file so those pages are only accessible from your lan. Also, do not allow root login over ssh. So long as you don't have too common of a username, it can make it very difficult to match up a nonstandard username with a password. Combin that with fail2ban, and that'll keep a lot of the baddies out.

Heh, another high school dropout here too :D. I made it by working my way up through crap jobs until I got a decent break. Started in tech support for an ISP, then worked in a computer shop, made some contacts. Moved on to building servers and doing linux loads, then worked in an RMA lab for a router/firewall manufacturer testing hardware. Finally got a break as an admin. I beat out a guy with a CS degree for that position, just because I could articulate how DNS worked. Pay wasn't great, but better than what I had been making. Now I've moved on, and don't have much trouble finding good paying work with years of admin work under my belt. I love that my last couple jobs have had CS degree as a requirement for the position. I believe it was Kurt Vonnegut's great uncle that said "90% of what a man knows can be learned by a dedicated individual in 6 weeks. The other 10% is just for show."

Way to go guys. Make the versions available on bittorrent sites that much better than what you can buy. This will really encourage people to shell out their money to sit through warnings, ads and previews. Maybe if they looked at what makes people want the pirated version you'd actually be able to sell it. A) No ads, warnings, previews for movies I don't care about. B) Less clicks and handing out of personal information and jumping through hoops to get a copy. C) They play on anything, or can be transcoded easily to play on a specific device if they don't already. I'm not locked into viewing this just on a limited set of devices that I'm allowed to play it on. D) Movies are just overpriced as it is. Things are supposed to become cheaper over time (if you account for inflation) not become more expensive. E) Most movies are not very good, and nobody remembers them a year later, anyways.

I've actually become a convert to gnome 3 after forcing myself to work in it for a day. A few minutes with a new UI isn't enough, you really have to spend a day working with it to really get a feel for it. It's actually really fast, and I'm fast with it. You just flick the mouse to the upper left, and you can do anything. It's definitely still rough around the edges, and far from perfect. It mainly needs more accessible configuration options, instead of having to have an extension for everything, but it will get there. Dual monitor support could be better too, but I know it will improve with time. I was a total hater until I really gave it a fair shot. I've used Unity for months on my netbook, and it's only usable on a small screen, though it does shine there. Plus Dash is terrible. Show me the Apps, not just the frequently used ones. If it were frequently used, I'd have put it on the dock and wouldn't be drilling through a menu in the first place.

I pretty much just chucked force unleashed because I always play games with the numeric keypad, and the game kept telling me to press the wrong keys. Is it so hard to check what key is mapped to do something? And what's up with having to exit the game and configure it from the pre-launch menu just to change the key config? I think overlord 2 was the last one I saw guilty of this.

I'm inclined to agree. I know ads pay for a lot of things, but when it makes the page load so much slower, I'm not going to wait for it. Flashblock and adblock are pretty much mandatory for me, and every computer I set up for someone else.

Maybe if I actually saw an app worth paying for, in the android market, I'd buy it. Most apps are pretty dumb. How many fart, soundboard, and girly apps are there? There's a handful that I probably should make a donation to, like connectbot, gmote, andftp, and cyanogen, but other than I've not seen much that even looks worth $1. A huge amount of us jumped to android since it's a relatively open platform. Those of us that are used to open platforms are not used to paying for much. They do specifically mention gaming, though, and my G1 has a terrible interface for trying to play games on. Great for what I use it for, but not so good for games. The hardware on most is kind of slow compared to the iphone, as well.