I have created two new servers to replace older, slower hardware. The new system for the webserver has a 64 Bit processor with 512 MB of RAM. Of course, new hardware almost always has some quirks... The original intent of this box was to run some virtual servers with XEN, but after a lot of putzing around trying to get the thing working I put XEN on the back burner for now.
The problems I ran into were two fold. First, trying to get XEN running at all. After a lot of messing around, I did manage to get it working, and was able to build 3 virtual servers. However, the box didn't have enough memory to handle all 3 servers at once - I had planned on 128MB for each, plus 128M for the base kernel. Turns out the base kernel wanted a little more, not leaving enough for the third virtual server to start up. So, the easy fix was to add another 512MB of ram for a total of 1GB. That's where the second problem came into play.
The motherboard in question (an Asus K8V-MX) seems to have a problem when two memory chips are in place. The moment I added the second chip, the server became very unstable and would lock up after random intervals. Troubleshooting through power management, kernel configurations, and such eventually pointed at faulty hardware. After running memtest a number of times, with the memory chips in various configurations, it became apparent that 2 chips at the same time was the culprit. This was even the case after the motherboard was exchanged. So either I had the bad luck of getting 2 boards from a bad batch, or this motherboard has problems with the memory slots. That's what you get for buying the cheapest equipment you could get. :)
I ended up loosing the XEN setup due to the memory problems. The original kernel turned out to NOT have ext3 support, so was treating my partitions as ext2. Ext2 doesn't have journaling capabilities. So when I cycled power to recover from a lockup, the file system became corrupted, and could not be repaired. So a reformat and reinstall of the OS. Wouldn't you know but during that brief period of a day or two, the Gentoo package for XEN got hard masked (which means it WILL NOT install, due to some perceived security/stability problems by the developers). So, the approach I had taken to get XEN running was out the window. My efforts with trying to install from source, or binary tarballs wasn't successful either. I'm sure some more time messing with it would have eventually got it running, but I wanted the new server environment up and running by the new year.
So, we now have an (non-virtual) instance of Gentoo running in native 64 Bit mode. This server is providing Web and database services (for the websites), as well as DNS for internal use. So far, it's been up and running stable and much faster than the previous server (a dual PIII-500 box). We also have a new mail server, which is running Gentoo as well and Kolab2. I have to say that installing Kolab for a basic site is very easy and saves sooooo much frustration!