I'm not interested in pizza, or beer, but here's what you need to get what you want. You can do all of this on Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, Slackware, whatever, just fine. The distro doesn't really matter. The main reason you would choose Fedora is if you have good personal taste, and self respect. Centos would be a little better if you would prefer longer term "support" over the glamour of new bells and whistles. Centos also doesn't do reiserfs without a fight if you were wanting that. Unless you intend to shell out big money for 100% real, hardware raid, from 3ware, LSI, Adaptec, Intel, etc. the tool you need is called mdadm. It is pretty straight forward, and documented here: http://linux.die.net/man/8/mdadm

This tool will make a fresh raid1 device named md0 out of sdb and sdc if you just type: mdadm --build md0 --level=1 /dev/sdb /dev/sdc

You can bring md0 online by typing: mdadm --assemble /dev/md0 /dev/sdb /dev/sdc

And watch it 'rebuild' the synchronicity of the drives by typing: cat /proc/mdstat

You can do a lot more than that with the mdadm tool, but nobody knows everything of it, so we all use the man pages. It's just as easy to make a raid6 device, with hotspares. There's just one more argument you add to mdadm.

To make the system recognize and automount the drives on boot, configure /etc/mdadm.conf. This involves adding DEVICE lines and ARRAY lines. It is very easy, and documented here: http://linux.die.net/man/5/mdadm.conf If you aren't able to read the man page for mdadm.conf, mdadm, the command will give you a cheat sheet of what to add in there. To see it, run: mdadm --detail --scan

To auto add it to the mdadm.conf file, run: mdadm --detail --scan >> /etc/mdadm.conf

After configuring the mdadm.conf, you can bring md0 online with: mdadm --assemble --scan

Most importantly though, it will come online on its own when you boot if it's in mdadm.conf, and you can configure failure alerts there too.

Then you should make a filesystem on /dev/md0 mke2fs -j /dev/md0

And make a directory to become its mountpoint mkdir -p /path/to/where/you/want/it/mounted

And add a line like this to your /etc/fstab file so your system will automount it at your mountpoint. http://www.tuxfiles.org/linuxhelp/fstab.html

The sharing with windows part will require one of two things: 1) Add an NFS client to Windows clients. -or- 2) Add a Samba server to the GNU server.

The former will be more secure because you will be able to turn off windows filesharing, which has historically been a large part of the windows' infection problem. If you would like to bring on the destruction of your windows machines, at the cost of adding another program (SAMBA) to your GNU server, just so that you change one less thing on the windows machines, go the route of (2).

To share with linux machines, read up on /etc/exports. (There's not much to read about really) http://linux.die.net/man/5/exports

If you go the samba route, install it via your distro's package manager if it is not already installed: yum install samba

It's documentation is at http://us3.samba.org/samba/ and an official howto is here http://us3.samba.org/samba/docs/man/Samba-HOWTO-Collection/ I once had to share files from a GNU server to windows clients, and under penalty of federal law, was not able to modify the clients (by adding an NFS client for windows). Samba was the solution, and it worked faster with a bunch of other crap running, on the same hardware, than Windows Server 2003 with nothing else installed.

On a side node, if you end up ordering pizza, use pizza_party, in gnome-terminal. http://www.beigerecords.com/cory/pizza_party/

DISCLAIMER: I'm typing all this from memory. Read, or at least glance at the man pages. Copy and paste at your own peril.

On Sat, Feb 23, 2008 at 7:50 PM, Earle Beason Earle-Beason@kc.rr.com wrote:

I have been playing with Fedora 8, still being the lin-noob here I have two things that I haven't been able to figure out. I would like to set up raid and configure it for my machine, I am using the m2n-sli deluxe board on a custom machine and use it as a media server for the house. Preemptively, yes they are better systems for this, and Fedora not set in stone an anybody welcomed to change my mind. However back to the issue I would like to have both Linux and M$ be able to read and write from the media-server. while I know the group meets regularly, I am unable to make any of the meetings due to other commitments. So I throw out the offer if anybody wish to crash my house on a Saturday evening and show me what i have been doing wrong, I'll throw up some Pizza and Beer, or any other drink that may be desirable.

Also if anybody is interested and has rug rats to deal with. My wife wouldn't mind watching them for a couple of hours, the house has been kid tested and the walls have already been drawn on _______________________________________________ Kclug mailing list Kclug@kclug.org http://kclug.org/mailman/listinfo/kclug