The Thinking Minority

Fixed the first snag; pseudo-static DHCP did the trick. On to snag #2: RAID.

Have managed to solve this, but what a PITA. Had to create /dev/md0, which involved
sudo /dev/MAKEDEV md

which put the devices in a lower-level subdirectory to be added to /dev/ at a later date. This makes sense in retrospect, but wow ... I'm glad I've got Google. One reboot later, and some shenanigans in /etc/fstab, and I have RAID.

So: I now have a working
1. Base OS & networking
2. Apache 2.2.4
3. MySQL 5.0.45
4. PHP 5.2.3-1
5. Software RAID (but haven't proven this is reboot-proof yet)
7. USB
8. SSH

Now on to the rest. This is going quite quickly, all things considered.