>I thought of using the Asus P2B-DS mainboard (with one 450Mhz PII, and

The ASUS boards were pretty good.  We settled on SuperMicro P6DNH2's for
the PPro 200's.  The P6DLH for PII's (9 PCI slots!!!).  They did very well 
but, are a bit pricer, uvision lists them at ~$600, where as the ASUS you 
mentioned was listed at ~$300.

>possibly buying one more as soon as NetBSD supports it :). However, that
>board has an Adaptec AIC-7890 U2W SCSI chip, and I know FreeBSD
>supports it through their CAM interface. Are there any ongoing efforts
>to support it in NetBSD?

>I would also like to run RAID 5, but I don't know if any controllers are
>supported. The Mylex Dac960 chipset should be fairly common. Does there
>exist a driver for this one (or any other RAID 5 capable controller
>(possibly ARO-1130 RAIDport))?

There is an Adaptec RAID-5 device that we evaluated , I think it was one 
of the AEC-4000 (or 5000) series. It worked reasonably well as I recall.
It comes in a 5-1/4" form factor canister that sits in the disk rack.  It 
connects to your PC adapter (2940? for instance), it has two ports to hook 
disks up to.

>I thought of using an Intel EtherExpress Pro 10/100 for my network
>connection. But I would like to know - which supported network card has
>the highest throughput at 100Mb?

I don't know the *best* card but, the NetGear FA310TX's are hard to beat.
They are dirt cheap but, be careful I understand they twinked the chipset
recently and they may not work on NetBSD anymore.  I get 62-68Mb/s using 
ttcp in 1/2 duplex and 92-94Mb/s in full duplex.

www.uvision.com lists them at $25 and the FA310TXC for $28, it comes with 
a 10ft UTP cable.

I don't know how that stacks up against other cards ... how much better can
other cards be?  The full dup mode only leaves 6-8% to work with  *8^).

Hope that helps and good luck,
Paul