Loren Charnley's questions

I have configured a server with CentOS 5.2 and am now working out a backup strategy. I plan on using Amanda as the backup application. Additionally, I am leaning towards using some USB hard drives for backup storage.

I will be swapping out one of the hard drives each week for an offsite back-up. Is it possible to make sure a particular USB hard drive is mounted to a specific mount point (maybe based on volume label or ID)?

Alternatively, what is a good strategy to use USB drives with Amanda using an off-site rotation?

I currently use IPCop for our corporate firewall & VPN. I am looking to consolidate a number of servers, and am considering including the firewall server in the consolidation. I currently plan on using Server 2008 with Hyper-V for the virtualization. Has anyone out there tried virtualizing IPCop? Is there anything that I should be aware of? In particular, IPCop has somewhat limited hardware support for NICs - what hardware will the VM see for the network card?

I am designing the next evolution of our IT infrastructure. I am considering implementing an iSCSI SAN. My current plan is to connect only our servers to the SAN, and then implement any file sharing to the desktops via network shares using one of the servers as a file server. After more reading, I am wondering if I need to implement a file server at all if I have an iSCSI SAN. Here are my questions:

1. Would I compromise the performance of the SAN to the servers if I let the SAN traffic run over the whole network, instead of just between the iSCSI target and the servers as clients?

2. If I create a "disk" on the iSCSI target, can multiple clients access the same "disk"? If so, can this replace network file shares?

I realize that question 1 is a loaded question, since I did not specify the particulars of my network, but I am just looking for general thoughts about heading down that path. Advance thanks for your thoughtful answers.