I have been planning on upgrading my web server for a long time. 
I have the last of my Novell NetWare servers that I am getting rid of,
and I am replacing them with a series of Linux servers running Fedora
Core.  I completed the first of these migrations a while back when
I installed my Linux box with qmail and replaced my old Mercury mail
server on NetWare.

Last night I began the process of installing Linux on a new
system.  I picked up the parts to assemble a nice system in a 19″
rack mount chassis.  2.4Ghz Intel Processor on a Intel 865
Motherboard.  1GB of RAM, and dual 250GB hard disks.  I got
the dual 250GB disks so that I can “mirror” them using RAID 1.

Everything went well … almost.  I spent four+ hours last night
installing over and over again since everything would appear to go
well, and the the server just would not boot.  I read a lot of
posts on-line, but nothing offered seemed to solve my problem.  I
finally noticed that when the system had been assembled, the first hard
disk was “master” on the primary IDE channel, and the second hard disk
was “slave” on the secondary IDE channel.  There was no master
device on the secondary IDE channel, so this morning I opened the case,
and changed the second hard disk to “master” … and everything worked!

So my experience is now:  When installing, have your two hard disks both be masters on the two IDE channels and things go a lot easier!

So what did I do to configure the RAID?  It was actually pretty easy except for the problem above.

1. Using the Disk Druid tool,
   I created three “Software RAID” partitions on my first hard disk by
   clicking the RAID button.  I created the first one for the /boot partition at 100MB, the second one for swap at 2000MB, and then the third for the / (root) partition that used the rest of the disk.
2. Next, I did the same to the second hard disk.  So now both
   of the disks each had three “Software RAID” partitions that were the
   correct sizes.
3. I then created the RAID 1 devices one by one.  I first
   created the md0 partition with a mount point of  “/boot” and a
   file system type of “ext3”.  Also, make sure to select RAID
   1!  I then selected the two 100MB partitions.
4. Second was the “swap” partition.  I set it to md1 and
   selected the file system type of “swap”, and again set this for RAID1
   and then selected the two 2000MB partitions.
5. Last, I created the root “/” partition by setting that as the
   mount point, setting it to be md2 and RAID 1, and then selecting the
   remaining two partitions.
6. Upon completing this, Disk Druid showed the three RAID Devices – md0 (/boot), md1 (swap), and md2 (/) and I was done.

As I proceeded through the rest of the installation, it went smooth
with no other problems.  The server installation completed and
rebooted just fine!

I got the system installed in my rack at the office, and immediately
came home to ssh in and apply updates.  The up2date session is
completing as I type this.  I have a few more things to tweak, and
then adjust some services, and then I can begin the process of
installing a bunch of new code!