Here is an update for those who are interested.  Didn't end up reinstalling,
instead I toughed it out through the problems (and my own ignorance) and got
things running again.  So, good for me.  I won't be touching that machine,
but it will be stepping down as my central server (i.e. gateway/firewall).

This thread opened my eyes to a more things, I went out and read a few more
LDP HOWTOs, now I have a new goal.  I have a new machine which will serve as
my gateway/firewall plus a ton more.  It's not quite all together yet--still
need to pick up the hard drives.  It's an Athalon XP 1600, 512 Mb RAM, that
will have a two disk RAID 0 on IDE 1 and IDE 2 (no CDROM).

This machine will be doing some serious work as I will be setting up
SourceForge 2.5 on it and using it to host a few projects.  So it will be
running (of the top of my head):

- Apache with mod_ssl/mod_php
- PostgreSQL
- Sendmail with Majordomo
- SSH
- CVS
- FTP (not sure which daemon, any recommendations?)
- Ipchains (masq/firewall)
- Registered Users with shell accounts (SSH only, no telnet)

There'll be about 3 projects, each will have a CVS/Database/2 Mailing
Lists/Release Downloads/2+ developers

On the other machine I setup, I kept running out of space on /var because of
the stupid samba logs ( must have configured something wrong).  Anyway,
there will be no samba on this machine, but I understand that mailing lists
and mail boxes take up quite a lot of space.  I also seems like a good idea
to put the CVS repositories in their own partition.  I guess the websites
could go in their own partition too, or maybe am I going overboard.

What would be a good way to partition up my 80 gig RAID (two 40 gigs) so
that everything runs optimally, has enough space and can be backed-up?

-David