Stuart, first let me say thank you for the support you have given. I kind of went off the reservation and loaded Unity desktop and g parted on my system. Probably really screwed it up but I was able to "see" the disks through gparted and format them and configure them. Stll not seeing them though in zentyal's disk manager. It see's the raid mirror just fine though.
That brings up File server and the needs to have a graphical user interface. In all my years of working around servers and not necessarily with them I understand the Gui versus command line argument better than most. I have worked with large server installations for defense contractors. So IMHO I am in firm beleif that Zyntyal really short changed itself with not having an optional Gui for us Evil Noobs from Microsoft. It comes down to useability. I am reminded of a graphic I've seen on FB where Apple, MS and Linux are compared to a toy dog, a German Sheppard and a wolf respectively. The toy looking cute butr pretty much useless, the Sheppard a friend that gets sick but its the users fault and the wolf that can be your best friend but needs lots of training and no-one can help with. In short if Zyntyal really wants to be the premiere SB Server then its going to have to integrate an optional gui desktop and file management with better hardware integration and management of the drives. The thing that I am scratching my head on is that it looks as if with unity and gparted, the basic's are already out there to be modularized.
So back to problem. I can in unity see the drive but my Fstab is not quite correct and needs updating. I formatted the drive with ext4 and even gave it a 1GB swap partition just to play with it. In short, it looks as if I really need to know about Ubuntu server before messing with Zentyal as its basically just a modular overlay of a basic server. Not so hot for us MS guys looking for a "Quick" solution to upgrading from MS SBS2003 as Zentyal likes to promote. Not a complaint so much as a critique on useability and more importantly saleability of the corporate version. One last thing I would add is that I think a lot of the confusion with Zentyal and others is they want a robust server that does it all like MS SBS. Well one of the most over looked things that I think even MS overlooked is that SBS was never a true server. It was a small business tool to do the things that small business needed to do in the it arena on a much smaller scale and most importantly an easier and automated way. In other words my problems I am having are indicative of what the normal SBS customer would have. We are not IT experts or even 20 something instant guru's with a smart phone and youtube. We are middle mangers that are tasked to runt the thing in the corner their with the spaghetti on top of it! Make it work, and we're going oh crap! I know little about Linux but I can work a mouse! So Zentyal needs to become not just more like a German Sheppard but a trained German Sheppard at that! A taller order than just being a secure server that works at everything! I think it's very capable of doing it, it just need to be worked on a bit and modularized.
Topic: Preinstallation woes. (Read 2367 times)