Terrible. Sorry, much geeking ahead and more bullet points:

• External 1TB hard drive failed.
• Couldn’t find the motherboard I wanted for OpenSolaris box, so got another, apparently compatible one.
• New system would not display on my Apple monitor. Worked on my TV though.
• OpenSolaris 2008.5 wouldn’t install (weird PBR error on boot).
• Tried to get community edition - the website refused to let me download (too many tries apparently).
• Searched Bittorrent, found a svn_93 image, installed fine.
• New ZFS pool shared via NFS and Samba was too slow. 2MB/s. Other people get 50MB/s or above.
• Tried to get community edition - using sun downloader - failed giving me filesize errors.
• Tried community edition svn_95 - no difference, (didn’t like this version BTW).
• Tried zeroing all the drives (was a tip that worked for someone). Took 7 hours. No difference.
• Bought new gigabit router and cables - no difference.
• Changed BIOS config between SATA/IDE and native and legacy settings. Install for each permutation taking about 2 hours.
• Mac Pro video card started playing up and overheating.
• Bought new graphics card for my Mac. It wouldn’t work. Just wouldn’t boot!
• Took Mac to shop - got ticket from a motorbike copper for stopping on double yellows. I was there for 30 seconds.
• Mac has kernel panicked twice lately, once before new graphics card, once after.
• Tried Linux, to see if the problem was with the OpenSolaris SATA drivers. Used Fedora. Lovely, perfect, until:
• Could not, for the life of me, get the Linux NFS share to work properly on my Mac via Directory Utility (spent about 3 hours on this - it worked fine for OpenSolaris). Samba works fine and gives me 50MB/s. So it’s not the drives or network. It’s the OpenSolaris SATA drivers for the ICH9 chipset.
• Bought SATA card with different chipset. svn_93 couldn’t recognise it. Bug fixed in svn_94.
• Found workaround, but that didn’t work. Resulted in driver misconfig error. Decided to get source code to compile but then changed mind. Toooooo far Tony.
• Gave up, decided on using hardware RAID5 on mobo, and Fedora Linux
• RAID setup program didn’t like my keyboard. Press left/right arrow and it crashes. Have to set to SATA in BIOS. Boot. Set to RAID. Boot. To get back into the setup program.
• Finally, Fedora Linux cannot mount the RAID partition. “Could not stat device” error. Not many of those on Google.
• Had a look at my Time Machine harddrive. For some reason, only had 2 days backups on! Turns out Time Machine backs up the Trash folder and I’d put a few hundered GB in there. Time Machine came along, saw it needed to back up a sheeeeet load of data, checked the space on drive and cleared down enough space! At least I think that’s what happened. And get this, I needed it. I was looking for a file I knew I had changed 3 days ago. I had 2 days of backups. FFS.
• Bought some new trousers, first day wearing them at work, I stood up, caught the pocket on my armrest and ripped the pocket off.

 Ahhhhh! Options:

1. Spend (on new mobo and CPU), wait (can’t get mobo until tomorrow), rebuild, reinstall, hope.
2. Go with sotware RAID5 on a Fedora 9 linux install.
3. No RAID, just go with ext3 in a big LVM on a Fedora 9 linux install.

  I’m going to try option 1. Big thanks to Simon. He’s been very helpful!