I spent most of the late morning and afternoon yesterday building my first AMD Athlon-based server from individually bought parts. Here are the pieces that I assembled:

• ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe motherboard,
• Western Digital WD Caviar WD1600JD 160GB Serial ATA (quantity 2),
• AMD Athlon XP 2500+ 1.83GHz 333FSB 512KB cache, and
• Corsair VS512MB333 512MB DDR333 PC2700 RAM.

It took me a while to figure out how to put these parts together. The ASUS motherboard and the AMD Athlon are really well documented. Installing an Athlon with the heatsink on top is a new experience. I was sure I was breaking the processor when I was trying to lock the heatsink onto it.

I don't normally put ATX systems together, so this was the first time I had to figure out how to connect the front panel power switch correctly to the motherboard just to get the machine to start. The first time I did it I had the wires flipped.

The key to this project is not installing the CPU correctly, attaching the hard drives to the case, or installing Linux, it's getting Sendmail to work with SpamAssassin and Vipul's Razor. That will be taking a lot of my time for the next few days.