[Techtalk] upgrading a file server

[Maria Pinjanainen]

On Mon, 14 May 2007 14:25:31 -0700
Maria McKinley <maria at shadlen.org> wrote:

> 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?) 
That is not a bad idea. But.. 
Is that simple enough? 
> 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.

THere is a nice OpeSource tool Partimage and with that you can backup and restore all partitions. 
I have made backups with that and it works. Even some M-S machines. It is a nice tool to "clone" things too.

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