Hi Elroy, Simon, and Daniel,

Thanks for your responses.  I've read similar things re: setting up RAID1 on an already-installed system being heinous and unbecoming.  I'd read that Fedora supports fakeraid (at least the Nvidia flavour) so I decided to wipe it all and give that a try, to see if I can nut this out myself.  The results were comical... RAID works perfectly (not the nvraid, but FC supports booting from software raid devices). 

Unfortunately, nothing else that I needed works now - I can't seem to connect to download new packages.  Web browsing and ping work fine, but yum seems to be broken.  Forums taught me that this is a fairly common problem but I still couldn't get it working.

Just finished chucking Vista on it for a laugh.  Got that out of my system pretty quick.  Now I'm just deciding between Ubuntu (terrible but surmountable raid setup) and FC (terrible but presumably surmountable other bits).  Essentially I need full RAID1, plus DHCP, plus samba.  Going to try with a fresh FC now, wish me luck!

Elroy if this doesn't work out I'll be in touch - thanks for the offer!  Hopefully I should know within a bunch of hours whether I'm going to win or not so I'll let you know.

Cheers!
 - Eric

wlug-request@list.waikato.ac.nz wrote:

Subject:
Re: [wlug] Help setting up DHCP and RAID in Ubuntu
From:
"Simon Green" <simon@simongreen.net>
Date:
Tue, 29 May 2007 15:25:04 +1200
To:
"Waikato Linux Users Group" <wlug@list.waikato.ac.nz>
To:
"Waikato Linux Users Group" <wlug@list.waikato.ac.nz>


A great source for Ubuntu help is their community wiki:
Raid1 -  https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/RAID1
DHCP - https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DnsAndDhcpServer

If no one else offers to help you at your home, you can always bring
your computer along to the Saturday workshop and we'll see what we can
do. We'll even provide you with coffee :-)

http://wlug.org.nz/SaturdayWorkshop.2007-06-09

 -- simon


Subject:
Re: [wlug] Help setting up DHCP and RAID in Ubuntu
From:
elroy <elroy@ihug.co.nz>
Date:
Wed, 30 May 2007 01:21:51 +1200
To:
Waikato Linux Users Group <wlug@list.waikato.ac.nz>
To:
Waikato Linux Users Group <wlug@list.waikato.ac.nz>

Hey :-)


Send me an e-mail, I can't say we'll get it completely sorted, but I'll give it a shot :-)

I can't say I know everything, but I recently managed to get 2x 80GB PATA HDD running RAID1 (looks like 160GB), then get that RAID1 array plus a 160GB SATA HDD into another 320GB RAID1 array - don't ask :-P

I will bring this machine over so we can look at its config.

Also my desktop is running Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper?), and has an eSATA port - never used it, but might as well bring it along, to see if your external drive does work etc.

You have spare power cables/network cables/multiboxes/mice/keyboards/etc?



Subject:
Re: [wlug] Help setting up DHCP and RAID in Ubuntu
From:
Daniel Lawson <daniel@meta.net.nz>
Date:
Wed, 30 May 2007 09:25:15 +1200
To:
Waikato Linux Users Group <wlug@list.waikato.ac.nz>
To:
Waikato Linux Users Group <wlug@list.waikato.ac.nz>		 

Unfortunately for the OP, taking an existing install on a single disk
and converting it to a software RAID1 set under linux is fairly tricky
to do. There are howtos around, but it's time consuming and potentially
dangerous, and it's definitely easy and probably quicker to reinstall
the machine and set up RAID1 from within the installer (even the Debian
Sarge installer supported this, btw).