Date: 05/21/05 (Computer Geeks)    Keywords: software, web, linux

has anyone had any experience with building raid-based file servers in linux?
I'm building one over the summer for my new student house next year, to provide storage for music, films, software etc.
I need at least 500gb of storage, preferably more, with some sort of redundancy. I have an old P2-500 with 128mb of ram sitting about, would this be adequate for about 6 users?
I was thinking of going down the RAID-5 path, as it provides redundancy, and a good ratio of disks to storage capacity.
I'm considering a software-based raid controller card such as this as they are much cheaper than a hardware-based raid card such as this.
Obviously the hardware based card would be faster, but I'm not so bothered about that, I'm more concerned with driver stability and compatability with my os of choice(gentoo)

Also, I assume I would have to run samba on this server to provide access for the llama's im living with next year who run windows.
Has anyone got any tips on securing samba, as I have heard it is fairly insecure, I could block internet access from the firewall, but I would like to run a web server on this box as well, would this be advisable, or would you advise running the web server on a seperate machine?

Source: http://www.livejournal.com/community/computergeeks/690839.html