Thanks for the feedback John
I had a look at Clark Connect, but they don't really have anything to offer me. I am attempting to build a cheap Samba file server with large capacity and reasonable redundancy. Throughput isn't an issue, and I don't need any services other than Samba on it.
I can't justify forking out for a new piece of hardware, but have a bunch of components that will do the job if I can get them to play nicely.
From you reply I take it that IDE controllers that use a Promise HPT (HighPoint?) chipset are supported by Linux. Is that the case?
Langdon,
Contrary to what has already been said, I believe that you should be fine runing Samba on RAID5 with a PII 400. Sure, it's not going to set the world on fire but, once the array has built the CPU should be plenty fast enough to keep up with updates.
I would echo the recommendation to keep the disks on separate controllers; if you put two on the same channel then one disk failing will most likely lock up the channel resulting in you losing two disks and therefore your whole array.
I can't offer any advice regarding whether or not the chipset is supported, but if you've got the cards and disks why not connect it all up and attempt an install?
Personally, I run a 6x250GB Maxtor SATA drives on 2 x Promise SATA150 TX4 controllers. I have partitioned each drive identically with a 1.5GB partition (/dev/sd[abcdef]1) and a 248.5 GB (/dev/sd[abcdef]2). It is not possible to boot of RAID5 so I created a RAID1 mirror from /dev/sd[ad]1 and installed the base system there. I then created an huge RAID5 array from /dev/sd[abcdef] and used lvm to create logical volumes for /usr (10GB), /var (5GB) and /home (915GB). I mounted these and migrated /usr and /var off the root partition.
Hope this is useful,
R. -- http://robinbowes.com
