Louwrentius

update november 2010: it is reported in the comments that the next release will support these controllers. However, which controllers are supported is not clear. Also, we may have to wait for quite some time before squeeze will be released.

Just a quick note: it seems that the new Dell RAID controllers are not supported by the current stable version of Debian: Lenny. The S300, H200 and H700 controllers as supplied with the R310, R410 and 'higher' systems, are thus not a great choice if you want to keep things 'stock'. You may have to run backported kernels and installer images and I couldn't figure out if these controllers actually work with these latest images.

The Perc 6/i controller is supported by Debian. It seems that it can only be supplied with the R410 and higher systems. If you have any additional information, like actual experience with these controllers, please report this.

I installed VMware ESX 4.1 and installed DEbian Lenny om top of that without problems.

Please note that the network cards of the R410 are still not supported and will cause a headache!

-network-card.html

The utility iftop allows you to monitor bandwidth usage. It is in some sense similar to tools like iptraf, dstat and bwm-ng. Iftop is more special than those. Because iftop lets you monitor the speed of individual TCP / UDP connections. Basically, you will be able to determine how much traffic is flowing between two hosts.

It is definitely worth a try.

Since I could not find a WAN failover script for Linux to my likening, I wrote one myself. If you have any use for it: I put it on a Google code project.

WFS tests the availability of your primary WAN connection and switches to your secondary / backup connection when a failure is detected. When in failover mode, WFS continues to monitor the availability of the primary WAN connection and once it becomes available again, it switches back.

For more information and a download, please take a look at the project:

http://code.google.com/p/wanfailoverscript/