Hey Larry, thanks for the kind words and your ongoing interest.
A good part of the requirements for my situation were dictated by money. I didn't want to buy another OS, much less another computer. That machine had previously, buggily, run Win98. There is no way I was going to spend the dough necessary to both bring up the hardware and buy the OS to run XP. However, it runs that Linux distro with ease, and the only money I spent was on the RAM upgrade ($40) and a new hard disk that I would have needed anyway (~$70). That's less than I would have spent on just a new MS OS.
FreeNAS is not worth it. It doesn't "do" anything. Spending an extra couple days on implementing a bare-bones linux install was worth it to me.
As to the Shuttle, it is an interesting form factor. However, if you're just going to put it in a closet anyway, why spend so much on a case that is so small? You certainly can't get multiple hard drives in something like that, and if it is not proximal to your listening space, the extreme quiet is hardly necessary. I tried to spec out a Shuttle HTPC and just ended up being frustrated and going with a Silverstone case instead. The only compelling reasons to use a Shuttle box are size and quiet. If it's in a closet, neither one is really very important, and you lose a lot of flexibility in the process, not the least of which is the proprietary power supply.
I like the looks of the Antec Sonata case for a good combination of cost, quiet and capacity. I might move the guts of my current server to one of those cases some day.
Other than working out the rsync stuff, I'm pretty happy at the moment. The fileserver is fine (accessible from all the other machines) and Slimserver/Sqeezesoft work just fine (either synched or independent). I just have to find time to put more content on the drive.
All in all, a pretty satisfying project. I've seen the future. Dang.
