[Samba] samba failover plan on unix OS using hardware RAID

[Jeanne Schock]

Hi all,

I've been asked to produce a plan for samba failover for an office with
about 30 2000/XP machines and a few unix servers. We currently have a
FreeBSD single-harddrive SCSI box providing samba, dhcp and dns services.
Reliability and cost are the priorities, in that order, over
speed/performance. We just need the reliability - we don't ever ever want to
have to switch to a new pdc. We could afford a few hours downtime in an
emergency, and there would be no data to save, just configs which are easily
backed up on a daily basis - I just need to assure my bosses that the trust
relationship between the pdc and the XP clients won't be broken, even with a
hardware failure.

So, my suggestion is IDE hardware RAID 1, single but very good raid card,
which can be replaced within a few hours by a trusted vendor, and 2 mirrored
harddrives.

What I would appreciate in terms of feedback is first, a basic sanity
check - is this a standard and good plan? If not - what is and why? And
second - I would really like to hear any real-life stories involving samba
with hardware RAID on unix. Did anyone have a RAID, blow a harddrive, and
have to/not have to rebuild the XP - trust relationship?

Thanks much in advance for your time,

Jeanne Schock
Systems Administrator
Regionalhelpwanted.com