I second this - a few years back I switched my home server to a Mac Mini from an old x86 box, for power draw and space/noise reasons, much like the original poster. At the time I checked out alternatives, but there wasn't much to recommend other machines, all the ones I could find had much more limited storage space. No doubt that has improved recently, but being able to fit any standard 2.5" drive is a big advantage if you want to use it as a file server.

My Mini draws 20W when idling (I tested it with a kill-a-watt). Power use will be higher under heavy load, of course, but your average home server spends most of the time idling. I'm pretty sure the 85W/110W ratings are the maximum the PSU can handle, not the power draw you'd expect in normal use. My box runs a web server, ssh, mail server, file server and various other bits and pieces. X is not installed. It is one of the old PowerPC Minis, which I think draw a bit less than the more recent Intel Minis, but I can't imagine the power draw has increased that much.

My advice to the OP would be to pick up a second hand Mini and use that - there might be machines out there designed specifically as low power home servers, but Minis are fairly easy to come by and easy to install Linux on as people have been doing it for a few years now, even if Apple don't encourage it. If you're thinking about environmental impact as well as your electricity bill, buying a second hand machine is going to be better than buying a new piece of kit. This was another part of my decision to go with a Mini, there are various computers designed to do the sort of thing the OP has asked for, but they're much more niche and consequently hard to find second hand.

By the way, if you choose to use a PowerPC Mini, choose a distro that fully supports PowerPC! When I set up the box Ubuntu still officially supported PowerPC, but it has since been switched to unofficial ports only support, which is pretty flaky. Debian is a much better bet, I am now using that as it is much more reliable (note to anyone who wants to call me on this, I am very happy using Ubuntu on x86 desktop, but my recent experiences of the PowerPC releases have not been favourable).

Some people are suggesting laptops, but I wouldn't recommend one myself. For one thing, they aren't designed or expected to be on all the time, and I suspect you're more likely to run into heating and dust related issues. For another, one of the main advantages of a laptop is that it has a battery and therefore won't require a UPS. However, leaving the machine constantly on and charging is going to kill the battery life fairly quickly, at which point it's not really very useful. On top of that, most laptops use 80W+ when running on mains power. They're usually only designed to save power when running from battery. Obviously you can change the power saving settings, but it's going to be a pain to do so.

Never mind development boxes, there are companies that specialise in Mac Mini colocation! I run a couple of these myself (although not colo), they're quiet, don't take up much space, and only draw 20 watts when idling. That said, I use second hand PowerPC Minis with Debian on them, because (as others have also commented) I find the £500 price tag for a new Intel Mini a bit ridiculous.

I'm kind of curious how they managed to fit two drives in, the ones I've opened up didn't have a great deal of space inside and storage capacity has always been a bit of problem because they only take 2.5 inch drives. While this isn't such a problem now, when I first start using a Mac Mini as a file server a few years back it wasn't possible to get a drive to store all the data I wanted.

With two drives I imagine there might be a bit of a cooling problem too, after several months of being on continuously the vents start to get a bit dusty - I know that shouldn't be such a problem in a properly managed server environment, but I can't imagine that's the market they're aiming at with this release.

What you say is true, but it's missing what I think is an important point: when you're moving house (to take your example), you need to work as a team. You need to discuss what you're doing, what to move first, and so on. There is a lot of social interaction required.

By contrast, when fixing a computer I find it's mainly interaction between me and the computer. Of course I talk to the user about what the problem is, how they would prefer things to be set, and so on. If they want me to, I'll explain what I'm doing as I go. However, when the person you're helping is at a pretty low level of technical understanding then the explanations take a long time and can be quite frustrating for both parties. I find that most people would rather just leave you to get on with it and maybe write them some instructions on what to do (or not do) in future.

By way of a car analogy, if a mechanic friend was helping me fix my car, I'd gladly help them out but since I know absolutely nothing about cars I expect they would rather just get on with rather than explain the basics of what they were doing the whole way through while I stood there being mostly useless!

I'd add to this that you don't need Exchange either. If you need Exchange/Outlook/MAPI compatibility there are various alternatives that run on other OSes, e.g. Zimbra, Zarafa, Scalix, even Lotus Domino. If you want to run a totally non-MS network, MAPI would not be much use to you, which opens up other options such as Citadel, eGroupWare or Kolab.

As has been pointed out by others, the most difficult thing about a large non-MS deployment is getting it to work with Windows. If you don't have Windows clients in your setup, it becomes much easier.

I don't get why people object to this template so much. I'd much rather read through it and get a quick overview of why people think a proposed anti-spam system wouldn't work, rather than sift through hundreds of posts, most of which are all saying the same thing...

Unfortunately, linking to /dev/null makes some sites not work, though I forget which, it's been a while since I tried that method. I ended up setting a daily cron job to delete the .adobe and .macromedia directories from users' home directories. It's not ideal, but it does the trick.

It's interesting that so many of the comments so far are saying things like, "these people aren't doing real work" or, "who would let their employees do this?". Like you, I work from varying locations from time to time - usually friends' houses rather than cafés, but it's the same principle. Not only do I appreciate the freedom and social interaction that being out of the office and my house affords me, but the people I'm working for at the moment find it reassuring that I can help out if needed without being tied to the office, wherever I might be at the time. Not that I'm keen on being interrupted, you understand, but being out and about can be an advantage (and seen as such), not necessarily an excuse to slack off!

As for security, which some people raised as a concern, it's relatively easy to use a VPN/ssh tunnel and an encrypted laptop if you know what you're doing, and that should be plenty of protection for most people. If you have a laptop for work you should have security in place anyway, unless it never leaves your desk, in which case why is it a laptop and not a desktop?

I'm told it's virtually impossible to make money running a small venue or festival. Moreover, the not-so-famous bands that tend to play at them are lucky to get travel expenses, never mind actually being paid to perform. The total revenue for live music may have gone up, but I'm willing to bet it's all gone to large venues and famous artists through (in my opinion) ridiculously high ticket prices.

It seems likely that the same is true, though perhaps to a lesser extent, of recorded music: small indie labels (e.g. Sotones, with which I'm loosely affiliated) don't tend to see a lot of revenue through direct sales of recordings. Most of the sales go through the big online stores, and they tend to promote the big/hyped acts, just as the big retail stores do.

This isn't to say things aren't changing in the music industry, but I wouldn't get too excited about the ascendancy of live and independent music just yet.