On Fri, 2007-12-14 at 13:14 -0800, Steve Lane wrote: > On Fri, Dec 14, 2007 at 03:41:31PM -0500, Lennart Sorensen wrote: > > On Fri, Dec 14, 2007 at 11:49:20AM -0800, Steve Lane wrote: > > > Greetings. We've got a 4-core (2 x Core 2 Duo) server that was originally > > > built as an i386 machine, then converted to the i386 bigmem kernel, > > > and *then* converted to the amd64 kernel. None of the packages on the > > > machine, however, are from the amd64 port - they're all i386. > > > > > > Is there some simple and straightforward (or even not-so-simple or > > > straightforward) way of converting the machine from the i386 port > > > to the amd64 port without rebuilding it from scratch using the amd64 > > > installer, i.e. to reinstall all the i386-specific packages from the > > > amd64 repository? > > > > I can't think of any way. You can create a chroot with debootstrap, but > > that's essentially just a harder way to run a fresh install. > > > > After all you can't have both the 32 and 64 bit version of libc6 > > installed at once in the same place, so you can't replace it while other > > packages which depend on it are using the other bitness. > > Yeah - I discovered that the hard way ;) > > That's more or less what I figured. Guess I'll be rebuilding at some > point :) Actually, if you do the chroot approach you could probably do the entire upgrade more or less in place. Do dpkg --get-selections on the i386 side, do a chroot build (no user intervention required), in the chroot do dpkg --set-selections, and then wait while it installs all the packages. Once it's done just copy over /etc and /home (and /var/spool/mail if you use spool mail files on the system), update /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/menu.lst (assuming you use grub), and reboot. If you REALLY want to do it the hard way, it would be POSSIBLE to do a fully in place upgrade but it really wouldn't be an effective use of your time. Look at how amd64 handles all the library locations with ia32 libs installed. (/lib32, /lib64, /usr/lib32, and /usr/lib64) This would be a LOT of work, though, especially with figuring out which services are using which libraries, when to stop them, when to restart them, etc. -- Alex Malinovich Support Free Software, delete your Windows partition TODAY! Encrypted mail preferred. You can get my public key from any of the pgp.net keyservers. Key ID: A6D24837
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