At a high level, here is what I did to configure three(3) old Micron boxen (Pentium 3, 500MHz, 64MB RAM, 13.5GB) to serve exclusively as rsync targets for production data:
1) Burnt a debian (etch) 4.0r2-i386 "netinst" CD.
2) Booted CD with "netcfg/disable_dhcp=true" option so that I could conduct static network configuration during the install.
3) Used following partition sizes: 800MB (/), 256MB (swap), and 12.6GB (/data).
4) Installed the minimal set of software I could get away with using the non-expert path.
5) Took CD out, rebooted.
6) apt-get install openssh-server (I used the "netinst" CD to satisfy this)
7) apt-get install rsync
8) Rebooted.
Note: I had to setup the BIOS to not halt on detecting a missing keyboard since the intention is to use them like that (no head either).
