[XCSSA] file server questions

[xcssa@xcssa.org]

I've confused myself.  Can someone help me verify this makes sense
before I commit myself?

I've got some large capacity drives coming.  Three 500GB drives
actually.  I'm going to run SW RAID-5 with them.  I anticipate what I
will do is use mdadm to create a RAID-5 array out of the disks, then
run LVM on top of that so I can allocate them into more than one file
system and/or resize them, etc.  So now my globally shared data is
protected against single-drive failure.

Then, what if the root disk dies?   So I think I want RAID-1 on /.  I
can do that, but do I want LVM on top of that?  The LVM HOWTO says
that root on LVM is for advanced users only.  I'm a noob at LVM and
don't want to learn what not to do the hard way.

Also, what about /boot?  Is there any advantage to mirroring that?  If
not, what if the disk containing /boot gets trashed?  Do I dd or rsync
to the other disk's identical /boot partition every night or
something?

I'm using whatever kernel the FC3 apt respositories give me when I
"apt-get install kernel#whatever".  Do I need to worry about this
initrd stuff?  I'm a bit of a noob at Linux kernel compilation too. 
And last time I apt-getted a kernel image, it installed the SMP
version but that one wouldn't boot.  I assume its something to do with
the kernel modules, but haven't had time to track it down yet.  I got
it working with the single processor kernel.

Do I want to do any kind of striping or setting of any other variables
when creating this huge shared data area?  I'm guessing that I might
want to do it at the mdadm layer and NOT at the LVM layer above it...

Any suggestions as to what kind of file systems or flags to use?
-- 
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