On Fri, 17 Jun 2005, . wrote:
At last, I upgraded to sid, see my previous mail here ...
OK, I'm glad this apparently went smoothly for you. I was concerned because it sounded like you installed with sarge and then used apt to upgrade to sid; I've never done it, and although I think it should work, I've heard stories...
Hmmm ... It is running a hardware RAID 5 on 6 SATA disks, one being a spare. I might be able to put in another disk at the on-board controller, but I´d have to spend weekends to install and to test. Whatever testing I could do then would be rather limited. It would be better to get another machine with an AMD64 and use it as my client and for the testing. Testing with it would be even more limited, but I have to do something about the issue --- it´s a very bad idea having to test on the production server. This time I seem to have been lucky, but what about the next time?
You hit the nail on the head.I don't know the details obviously, but in the machine I picture in my head, you can take a cheapo ###GB EIDE drive, stick it on the motherboard, partition it out, and cp -ra / /mnt/stagingdrive... then grub it, and reboot with the RAID disconnected. It's actually pretty simple, just takes a bit of time to copy depending on how big your system is.
But of course this is a pain every time you want to test something, not least the downtime involved. Unless there's a real cash crunch (or you don't expect to make many changes to the box), you really should get a whole staging box. Well, VMWare could be a good alternative, but not yet (no 64-bit guest support right now). Even then; running VMWare on your production host... eh.
You have a nice-sounding server. The specs you've listed tell me you're obviously concerned with data loss and downtime. Does it make sense to have a RAID, but not a staging environment? I hate to say it, but we human beings are more likely to fail than disks. :D