[gentoo-user] {OT} An old iBook G3 as server

[Momesso Andrea]

I alredy have a gentoo home server up and running with decent hardware
(a FUJITSU SIEMENS Amilo M3438 laptop, Pentium M 1.86GHz, 1.5Gb ram)
that I use for general purpose (backup, portage-rsync, bittorrent,
groupware) and also for my wife's work (a joomla site, a ftp server,
and a mailing list manager).

The work my wife does as a researcher for the university is growing
fast, her group relays in the ftp server for uploading important
documents, and she also required me to set up a wiki.

I now think it's time to set up something more "hardened" and to have a
separated box for her work, to reduce the risk that I break things while
trying experimental stuff, masked packeges ecc.

It comes that they had from their  mentor an old iBook G3 to see if it 
fits their needs.

I will recive the machine tonight and start to work on it this weekend,
so yet I don't know the amount of memory it has, but I know for sure
it's expandible to 544Mb, and I will surely do the upgrade if needed.

Here are my questions:

- Is gentoo pcc stable enough to work on a server?

- What kind of checks should I do to verify that the hardware
  (expecially the disk) is fine? 

- Is it possible to use the other server (x86) to build packages for the
  ppc?

- Due to my limited space I'd like to mount some non-vital stuff on nfs
  shares. Is it aviceable to mount /usp/portage on nfs? or maybe just
  the distfiles?

- What would you suggest for automatic daily backups?

- I use gentoo as the only os on all my machines and it is the distro I
  fell confortable with, but is it really a good choiche in this case?
  Would a compiled distro better fit my needs?

Thank yo in advance for your answers.