Slack-Moehrle wrote:

My 12 year old wants to learn more about servers and has memorized a lot of commands like ls, chmod, du, etc. He wants to have his own domain and server on the web and I have enough Static IP's, so why not foster this interest.

I'd say go the VM route if you can, safer, easier to un-screw when he breaks the whole thing, and certainly more dynamic(setup many systems so they can talk to each other etc), and likely save a lot on power.

nate