Well, personally I'd try and avoid software RAID solutions completely and plump for Hardware RAID where it's available. Software RAID, especially when it involves system (root & swap) partitions add a lot of complexity to a configuration and can make disaster recovery situations *extremely* difficult. Trust me, I've had years of experience of digging customers out of situations like this. Until recently however software RAID has been the only choice where redundancy (or bandwidth) requirements have dictated that volumes are mirrored across controllers. New hardware like Compaq's (Digitals) HSZ70 Intelligent RAID controllers can provide this functionality now (i.e. an HSZ70 pair, linked together in a dual redundant configuration & also dual ported to multiple SCSI controllers) But this is relatively new and not widely used yet. It's also more expensive than software RAID, and so is mostly reserved for big mission critical sites. Back to the topic at hand ... The information on that web partition is not entirely factual. LVM was written by IBM and submitted to the OSF. It was included in OSF/1 as a core technology, but Digital (as they were then) dropped it after a couple of releases of DEC OSF/1 because it was highly buggy and deemed unfixable at the time. They then migrated over to LSM. In fact it's the Logical Storage Manager (LSM) aka the Veritas Volume Manager that the de-facto industry standard for software RAID on UNIX (Solaris, HPUX, Tru64 Unix, etc) and there are a lot of skills out there in this product that Linux could make use of. Veritas seem to be taking quite an interest in Linux too. If LVM is the only product where we have access to the source code, then maybe it should get a vote. But if LSM and LVM are equally available, then I'd recommend LSM instead. Though I guess it doesn't really matter so long as whatever is chosen is above all else, stable, and emergency recovery procedures are VERY well tried, tested and documented. Regards, John PS: A tip to SuSE .. if you're gonna back this thing, make sure you have LVM built into your CD recovery kernel for people to use in an emergency. -- To unsubscribe send e-mail to suse-linux-e-unsubscribe@suse.com For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the FAQ at http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/