sangretu's questions

I recently purchased a DroboPro to replace my 2TB RAID 5 array. The new device has 8 SATA bays, and I've filled 5 of them with 1TB drives, giving me about 4TB of available space.

The old RAID server ran Fedora 4, but the DroboPro doesn't seem to have support for linux hosts. I've had to rely on a 64-bit XP machine just to get partitions > 2TB.

The problem is, I've lost a lot of the features I'm used to having on my file server : most notably, file linking and *nix-style permissions.

Any suggestions how best to fill the gap?

I'm setting up a large software RAID array using MDADM, and don't want to waste a drive bay on a system disk. Unfortunately, the server I'm working with has trouble booting from a USB drive, so I'm attempting a workaround.

I want to create a LiveCD with Knoppix or some other suitable distribution, then use the USB drive as a mountable storage device to keep all my admin scripts etc on. I plan on running several services including:

Samba SSH SFTP Subversion (SVNServe)

I'm used to running a headless Fedora server, and that would be ideal, but I'll take what I can get. Can anyone suggest a good approach for this problem? Specifically - an appropriate distribution to use, how to configure the LiveCD, and how to get it to automatically mount and run certain scripts on the USB drive?

Trying to set up a headless LDAP server on a linux virtual machine (vmware). Small scope, but needs to be reliable and easy to use. Strong preference for simplicity over features, command-line over gui.

What are some of the good options?

Also need some sort of client / manager utility for it so I can log in remotely, view the contents of the directory, and make changes as necessary. Web based is fine, but a standalone windows client would be ideal.

I've tried to set this up a few times, always got hung up somewhere along the way. Can someone point me in the right direction?