James Butler's questions

This might be a highly daft question so apologies in advance... I have the following set up:

100 Mbit on 1Gbit carrier Fibre line into comms room,
Fibre <-> EDD (ethernet demarcation device)
EDD <-> [switch A]
[switch A] <-> router 1 <-> [switch stack Z]
[switch A] <-> router 2 <-> [switch stack Z]

The routers are running pfSense with router 2 acting as the failover for router 1, floating IP's, synced interfaces etc.

My questions is, what sort of switch (if any) should I be using between the routers and the EDD?

The EDD only has one port activated on it (and is controlled by our supplier) so I initially tried putting a crappy SoHo 10/100 8-port netgear unmanaged switch as [switch a] but suffered horrendous packet loss (4 - 16%) and no single TCP connection could get above 80 Kbps.

So I binned that and replaced it with a slightly higher grade 100/1000 8-port linksys which seems to be doing a better job (no TCP throttling, only very occasional packet loss (2% max)).

However this still feels like the wrong solution to the problem of connecting both routers to the single EDD, any suggestions anyone to how this could better or at least anything very wrong that I'm doing?

Being a bit of a newbie to NginX redirects and not particularly ninja with my regex, could someone please provide some points for how to do the following 301 redirects in a sane way.

(apologies for awful example names)

website.com/what -> website.com/en/what 
website.com/team -> website.com/en/team
website.com/stuff -> website.com/en/newstuff
website.com/stuff/this -> website.com/en/newstuff/foo/bar
website.com/stuff/that -> website.com/en/newstuff/thing/page

While i would love for someone to give me the exact answer - I'll settle for some good pointers or examples of roughly what i need to be doing or the sort of direction i should take.

If it helps I'm running nginx 0.8x on Ubuntu 11 and site itself is written in CodeIgniter,

For example if i have a 4TB ZFS Volume, is it possible to create 3 folders and then limit each folder to, say, 2GB. If so, how?

I have googled hard and wide but to no avail - all i get is info on the 18TB license restriction.

All and any advice gladly taken.

---EDIT

After testing all the below answers worked, I'm giving my correct answer to GUI related answer as i feel its the most correct solution to the problem, however the rest are useful to read.

How difficult (if at all possible) would it be run a copy of Amazon Linux on a private physical server or hypervisor (Virtualbox/KVM) ? (I am thinking something based in a office/home) I realise it essentially RHEL/Centos with more up to date repositories and some minor changes but I can't help but feel many people would it find it useful to be able run their own copy for staging/development either in the office server room or on their desktops/laptops. I have done some searches on google but can't seem to find any mention of anyone trying this.

As a follow on, if it is possible can anyone suggest some sane steps to actually doing it? (Alternatively if this actually a really daft question and i haven't fully thought it through feel fee to pillory away) (or better yet, if you can think of an alternative - fire that off too!)

This may seem a daft question (and i fear it might be), but would it be possible for a server acting as a network's sole DHCP server send out a request for an IP address to the network, then catch its own request and answer it?

All of my intuition points to a no answer and ideally i would test it out but i don't have the time/spare resources currently so i was hoping someone else may have had the same thought and tried it out.

This is meant to be a generic question but if anyone is interested i'm running isc-dhcp on ubuntu 11.04

Is there a way to exclude a single IP address from a DHCP pool? For various reasons I have a machine that I can't reconfigure or move off the network (let's call it a printer). It has been hard coded with address x.x.x.50 and my DHCP pool is x.x.x.10 -> x.x.x.246. I don't want to have two pool definitions for this one subnet just to cover the ranges on either side of this machine. Is there some form of 'exclude IP' argument/option?

I'm using Ubuntu 11 and the isc-dhcp-server package.

DISCLAIMER: I have googled and it only came up with IOS and Juniper configuration info.