[NTLUG:Discuss] couple of questions

[Monty Shinn]

Greetings.

Question 1:

I have a number of "servers" that run single-disk commodity hardware.  We do this simply for costs reasons.  What I would like to do is make a disk image for each server and store each image on a raid-based storage box (or dvd).  In doing this, if one of the boxes falls over, I can just do a ftp (or nfs, I think) re-install over the network to the repaired box without having to go through all of the re-configuration steps.  Basically I want to be able to point to a disk image on another server, and copy whatever is in that image file back to the repaired "server", and have it boot up with all configs, settings and partitions in place.  These servers are redhat based.

Can anyone point me to a valid howto that describes the above scenario?  I am not even sure what to search for.  From what I can tell, >>dd<< doesn't appear to do what I want.

Question 2:

Using KDE, when I open up a local, nfs or smb mounted directory that has 500 gigs or more of files, it takes an exceptionally long time (up to minutes) for the KDE window to refresh and display the contents of the directory.  I am not sure what is going on.  When I open the same directory using MACOSX or Windows, it doesn't seem to take as long.  It certainly doesn't take as long using MACOSX.  Has anyone else witnessed this issue?  Any thoughts on how to resolve it?  I have seen this on redhat and slackware based boxes using KDE 3.5.  I am using the EXT3 filesystem.

Please forgive the newbie nature of these questions.

Thanks in advance for your help and time,

Monty