"Ultimate" FC5 small office server?

[drunkahol]

Folks,

I've had an urgent request from a mate of mine to create a backup solution for his 2 person office. He has a spare Dell Dimension L800r with 128Mb RAM and 20Gb HD that I can use as a server with 3 other machines that will run Win XP. I think I can lift the RAM to 512Mb, but I understand that the BIOS only supports 137Gb disks.

Now I'm going down the FC5 route until at least CentOS 5 gets rolled out, so the current 20Gb disk will probably do for the OS installation. I have a few questions, however, about hardware/Linux support for the venerable minds of FedoraForum to ponder.

1. What's the opinion on the best SATA Raid card supported under Linux? I'd like to whack in 2 disks with mirroring to create a large Samba shared storage area and to provide for disk backups of the laptops and desktop. I've experience of high end SCSI & SAS Raid cards through my work, so online rebuilds and hot-swap would be nice although not absolutely necessary.

2. I have no idea what tape drive support is like for machines of this size. He needs to show evidence of weekly off-site backups or his professional body will not be happy (so say the VERY least).

He's never had shared storage for his office before, or print sharing, firewall, mail server, fax server, VPN etc, etc. I've got designs on doing all this using FC5 eventually, but the off-site backups is pretty urgent as he's getting an on-site inspection from the professional body before the end of July.

Anyone got any ideas on good hardware for this kind of job? Or any other services that I could get the FC5 server to provide?

Cheers

Duncan

[pparks1]

Why would you bother setting up Fedora now to just turn to CentOS later? I would start with CentOS now since this is for a business. You need stability more than anything else, and a "bleeding edge" distro like FC is just not suitable for that type of environment.

1. As far as SATA drives, you could probably just go with IDE drives and also use software mirroring on this sytem. Since they aren't using shared storage and it's a small network, it's doubtful that the performance impact of using software RAID is really going to be a problem here. Of course, that comes at the expense of not being hot swappable....but then again....this is for fault tolerance and drives shouldn't be failing that often. (but I know where you are coming from, we have hundreds of servers at my shop and don't use anything but hardware RAID).

2. Can't give you much advice on tape backup solutions. We use Veritas NetBackup where I work and it backs up the network centrally to a robotic tape library. I haven't had a backup drive in a server for years now....so I've lost touch with that world.

[drunkahol]

Sounds like you work at the same place as me . . . everything with hardware raid and not a tape slot in sight due to NetBackup. I've always found the tape robot cool to watch though (sad really).

The reason I wanted to go for hardware raid is the 137Gb drive limit in the BIOS. I don't think there's enough there to connect up 2 drives and software Raid them. If there was more space, it wouldn't be such an issue. Putting a SATA Raid card in allows me to create a big fat raid without worrying about the current system internals.

The 3ware 8000 cards are looking good at the moment (as long as I can fit them in the box!). Then stick 2 large SATA drives in and let the 3ware card worry about the mirroring.

The tape device will probably have to be Parallel ATA, so I can't afford to "waste" the slots on doing a software raid setup.

Cheers

Duncan