At work we recently purchased a new file server that has a brand new Areca 1880 series RAID controller. Which unfortunately is not supported by the arcmsr kernel module that ships with Ubuntu Server 10.04.1. So I looked around on the web for someone who's blazed this trail before me and only found the occasional forum post that offered a few hints for a particular problem that someone ran into in this process. I never found a detailed walk through the entire process. Which lead to this blog post that I hope will help fill in the gaps for others.