[KLUG Members] any experience with Debian Sarge & Dell 39160 SCSI controller?

[Richard Harding]

> Of course,  if you buy a "real" server (aka IBM) with a ServeRAID card
> everything will just work, the monitoring software will work,  and you'll be
> able to query drive status (online, defunct, etc...) remotely.  And if a part
> fails you'll get good support often times even after the warranty 
> period.  

I purchased a IBM x236 with the serveRaid-7k card. I am wondering if
anyone has any quality links to information regarding LVM for this? This
is my first REAL raid excursion so I purchased 4 drives to have a 3
drive array with hot-swap. What I want to do is setup LVM so if I need
to add on I should be able to add disks a bit easier. The system will be
Debian sarge normal netinstall. 

I also wondered what everyone is using for file system types. I've
always just used ext3 because it's the old workhorse, but I've been
reading a ton of good things about the alternative XFS/Reiser formats.
What's everyone actually using in practice? Does the raid setup
help/hinder any of file system options?

Any other tips/advice would be welcome. Hopefully I can get this all
working and the dream of a machine that can reliably survive a disk
failure can come true. :-)

Thanks

Rick