After several different iterations finally settled on Ubuntu Server. Tried FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, CentOS, but just didn't find all the features I wanted. The bsd's had the easiest setup as far as routing/firewall/nat(network address translation) but I ran into problems with the NAT(network attached storage) the UPnP, the printer drivers and the LDAP. I wanted to consolidate all my servers into one small and energy efficent machine for under 100 bucks. I ended up going with an Intel Atom 230, dual core with hyper threading for 4 threads. 1 gig of memory. Ubuntu Server 9.10 (will switch to 10.04 when it comes out next month, has a longer support path and will inevitably be more stable), 750g of storage, and dual intel gigabit nics. It does a great job. I was surprised to see a noticable performance boost moving from sparcs, then again when moving from bsd to linux.
The Machine is able to juggle all the task I have it running (won't list them all here today maybe later) but it does great.
The only thing is I have a bridge and it takes a couple second to come up which cause some network services to fail, I had to delay their start by 60 seconds and that took care of the issue.
