Hello people!

I wonder if you can help...

I am going to take delivery very soon of a Dell Poweredge 2950 III server of the following spec:

• 1x Quad Core Intel Xeon L5410, 2.33GHz CPU
• 4GB Memory, 667MHz (2x2GB Dual Ranked FB DIMMs)
• PERC 6/i, x6 Backplane, Integrated RAID Controller Card
• 4x 300GB, SAS, 3.5-inch, 15K RPM Hard Drives (Hot Plug) - these will be configured as 2 separate RAID 1 (mirrored) arrays.
• DVD+/-RW Drive, SATA
• Two Hot Plug Power Supplies
• Riser with PCI Express Support (2x PCIe x8 slots; 1x PCIe x4 slot)

This system is going to operate as a new mail server, taking over from a desktop-grade, Debian 3.1 box that we've been using for years, so we'd like to stay with Debian to make the move easier. Ubuntu would be the second choice, but i'd rather go with stability as opposed to latest versions, so i reckon Debian is the better choice in this case.

Anyway... some questions...

Is the latest stable Debian release actually going to install onto this hardware?

Will the RAID card be recognised and work perfectly?

If a drive dies in the array, will we be notified somehow? This, i presume, would require some software which would then rely on the drivers, so i guess this is back to the question above.

Can anyone see any potential problems with running the latest Debian on this hardware at all?

Basically... i'm going into unknown territory here, and this server needs to be built quite quickly, hence i want to be prepared!

Thanks in advance to anyone who can help!

actually... one other question is - given that the latest stable Debian still has a 2.4 kernel, would i be better going to Ubuntu to get the 2.6 kernel for performance reasons? Or is the 2.4 kernel no slower than the 2.6 in terms of disk IO and other things generally?

well, as it turns out, the latest stable Debian actually is a 2.6.26 kernel, so my last posting should be ignored...

i could still do with some answers to the first posting if anyone is able to answer it though?