[lug] Vintage NP netserver RAID, NT4 and Linux

[Craig H. Anderson]

This is partially on topic and someone on the list
may have some help for me. 

I'm working in a shop with a number of surplus
HP Netserver pentium servers.  3 are Netserver LH plus.
There are other models as well.
This is currently an NT 4.0 shop with no budget to
do anything else right now (Officially hostile to Linux)
We can't get money to buy new hardware or bring in a tech to help either. 

There are 6 HD bays with slide in boxes.  For work purposes,
I will be a hero If I can do a fresh install of NT 4.0 and MSSQL
and put them to use in the data center.  I have an HP config CD
and found support floppy images at hp.com, but the raid
is giving me fits. 4 drives are 4G and 2 are 9G.  The raid config
software complains if it sees different size drives.  If only 1 size
is plugged in I can config the array, but I need all 6 drives.
If I plug in the other size drive after raid config, NT doesn't
see the non-raid drives at all.  Help! 

Now the linux content.  What kind of Linux support do
these boxes have?  These servers are work horses, but the
size and memory constraints are unattractive.  If I know of
a Linux distribution that is straight forward to install I may
find a use for them running Linux. 

Thanks.