A call for recomendations and helpful some advice

[Paul Moore]

One of my drives decided it had had enough of this cruel world and committed 
suicide this past Sunday, taking with it my /var partition.

 Ungh.

The system is up and running again, and most everything is happy, however, I 
have lost enough things to make me consider reloading the system.  This leads 
me to my first series of questions.

 o Preserving a LVM set residing on a software RAID mirror

This machine has LVM running on top of a two disk software RAID mirror.  The 
filesystems affected are the user home directories and mail spools - i.e. 
I don't want to trash this across system reloads.  Any special steps I need to 
take?  Can I simply recreate the RAID set and the LVM bits on the new system 
and it wil automagically detect the exsiting on-disk bits?

 o Distro recommendations

I have run RedHat for a while now and as a result have gotten comfortable with 
it.  However, for what I want this machine to do RedHat has gotten rather 
bloated and cumbersome.  I have experience with Mandrake as well, but I 
consider that a step in the wrong direction for this machine.  This machine 
acts a small server for myself and my wife.  I houses files which it exports 
via NFS, Samba, and Netatalk.  It relays mail, serves mail via IMAP, and 
fetches mail from a variety of sources (man I love fetchmail).  It also 
acts as a login server and hosts a small number of web pages.  This machine 
sits in a closet and does not have any sort of local console, i.e. I have no 
need for X/KDE/GNOME/etc.

I am looking for a distro that does not require hundreds of 'packages' to be 
installed and provides an easy and automatic methos of updating them to deal 
with bugs, I have something like apt-get in mind here.

I have heard some good things about both Debian and Gentoo, and from what I 
have heard these would be reasonable fits for what I need.  So, 
very-opinionated reader, care to share some?

Thanks,

-- 
      . . . paul moore . . . www.alumni.engin.umich.edu/~pcmoore . . .