I have a Subversion server running on a Mac mini at home and one at work running on an old Pentium 4 machine running some non-current version of Fedora Core. Certainly this kind of server doesn't need a whole lot of horsepower. The mini also functions as DNS for the home network, as well as our digital video recorder (with an eyeTV interface). Certainly a subversion server doesn't need a dedicated machine, although it might make sense to install it on your company machine that handles other server stuff, like the gateway, DNS, floating-license serving, etc. Of course if your IT people are idiots, then there's no reason why you can't take last year's engineering workstation (now this year's paperweight) and use that as the server.

There are prebuilt packages for most operating systems that let you install the server in no time at all.

Maintaining it is a simple matter of occasionally downloading and installing updates (a painless process), and setting up a cron or launchd job to back up the repository on a regular basis. All of this is free, except for the time involved.

-a