[Techtalk] upgrading a file server

[Maria McKinley]

Hi there,

I have a drive that is failing. It also has a pretty old linux (debian) 
distribution, 2.4.27. I have installed linux on a new drive on a test 
machine, and somehow ended up with 2.4.25. Not sure if the difference 
means much. I am interested in upgrading the system entirely, though. My 
current plan is to copy the /etc and /usr/local directories from my old 
machine to the new machine, and then test my new drive. (Is this a bad 
idea? Better way to do this?) Once I am sure all services are working, I 
am thinking the smartest thing to do is copy everything over to another 
new drive (best way to do this? How do I handle different partitions, is 
there a hard drive copy tool that paritions the new drive in exactly the 
same way, or do I need to do this by hand first?), and then upgrade this 
drive. However, it will be hard to test this, except by shutting down 
the new working server and trying to run the upgrade as the server, 
since I can't have two servers running with exactly the same 
configurations on the same network. But at least, if I can't get the 
upgrade working in a reasonable amount of time, I can go back to the new 
working copy.

Feedback about any of this plan is much appreciated. How do other people 
handle upgrades on critical servers?

thanks,
maria