The only other problem that I have run into so far has been the way the installer insisted on installing the MBR to the wrong drive (hda rather than hde). I reinstalled, saying no to installing grub on the MBR and entering the destination manually, but then grub was still pointing at the wrong drive, so I had to find the drive vmlinuz was on (with find vmlinux-versionstuff), and change the root command accordingly. The obscure southpark reference I went for in the end was 'uriel', after the Archangel of salvation (episode 904) - quite appropriate for a backup server, I thought...

As I said yesterday, I have gone for Debian stable again. Some people don't like the way that everything's out of date, but the only thing that has caused problems for me in the past was the version of Samba - 2.2.3a gave me a serious headache with Flash, so I ended up using a backported version - not ideal. However, a new version of Debian stable has recently been released, and that comes with Samba 3, so no problems there.

To me the advantage of using Debian stable is that it doesn't change. I can install it, set it up and then leave it, safe in the knowledge that any security problems will shortly be patched through apt-get. At the end of the day this computer is a tool to make sure that I don't lose my work if/when a hard drive fails, and I don't want to waste my time upgrading things that are working fine - I just want to use it.