You forgot one thing though... fun. I enjoy creating something tangible from a pile of parts.

You're right though, I wouldn't do it for money. Not worth it these days.

I just started doing this myself. I had stopped using my MacBook due to bootcamp issues (was taking a class that required MS Access so I needed Windows). The drivers (touchpad especially) just didn't work that well under Windows 7. I had switched to an old thinkpad dual booting windows and linux.

Recently discovered VMware Fusion and now I have a virtualized Windows 7 on my MacBook which lets me run office and internet explorer (for the 1 stupid IE only website I need to use). $50 for fusion and now I can run windows/linux/whatever flawlessly under OSX with very little slowdown.

Biggest caveat, the Fusion Unity application support only extends to XFCE, Gnome, and KDE (does not work with e17 or LXDE) so make sure if you install a linux distro it's using one of those DE's or Unity will not work as nicely.

It sounds funny, but my favorite feature of my MacBook is the MASSIVE touchpad that works flawlessly. I don't know why manufacturer's skimp on the touchpad given that it's the primary input device, but I looked at dozens of laptops before I purchased a used thinkpad because it had the trackpoint, but they all had one feature in common... a crappy touchpad.

And if you aren't using Chrome... Ghostery for FF works great too

I've been running a few websites with email accounts off Dreamhost for a few years now, and I highly recommend that over rolling your own. Sure, you might be losing some of the flexibility of a complete from scratch solution, but you're also handing off a lot of the administrative hassles to professionals. Plus since it's a paid solution I'm not as concerned about my data being fodder for google's growing empire.

The whole thing is running off a virtualized server that I pay $15 a month for. No blacklist issues (so far in like 3 years) since it's a known IP block with a known hosting provider. Spam is a minor issue, they're running spamassassin which on it's own seems to do an all right job. It gets the worst of the worst and thunderbird picks up a fair amount of it as well. The webclient uses roundmail, which is somewhat dated, but has a decent ajax interface. I think they have some other choices for webclients but to be honest I don't use them that often.

Could also be a distance thing... been awhile since I ran cables, but as I recall the limit is something like 100m? So if it's a larger dealership (in size) it may have just been easier to run fiber between two geographically distance switches.

As I understand it, as long as they are only using it internally (IE not distributing it) they have no legal requirement to release the source.

I know this doesn't exactly answer your question... but unless your machines are widely geographically separated, why not cut out the middleman and just get a hard drive and a usb2 enclosure? You know exactly what you are getting (instead of all the debate about "real world" performance). Sneakernet ftw

DD-WRT bandwidth meter:
August 2008 (Incoming: 17734 MB / Outgoing: 3549 MB)
July 2008 (Incoming: 12001 MB / Outgoing: 4202 MB)
July 2008 (Incoming: 12001 MB / Outgoing: 4202 MB)

Most of that is just from me - music/movies/linux isos, etc. I do have a roommate but youtube is about as bandwidth intensive as his use gets.

You would have to use a LOT of bandwidth to hit the 250gb cap comcast reported the other day. I download a lot and I'm not even at a 10th of that cap.