Mission-critical upgrades
>Date: Sun, 26 Jul 1998 00:33:26 +1000 (EST)
>From: Chris <chris@ormond.unimelb.edu.au>
>To: debian-user@lists.debian.org
>Subject: Upgrade to 2.0
>
>-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>
>
>
>Hi,
>
>Just a question:
>
>I have an EXTREMELY important machine running debian 1.3. I can't afford
>this machine to be down for an extended period of time, nor for massive
>reconfiguring. I would, however, like to upgrade to 2.0. Is it possible
Anything is possible with appropriate planning.
For machines that are as important as make this one sound, you should
probably spend some timec thinking about WHY you want to upgrade and what
your VIS(Very Important System) will gain by the upgrade.
If you're just doing this to keep up with jones.com, it may not be that
good of an idea to begin with.
What's "an extended period of time" ? An hour or two?, overnight? a
day?
>From tghe sounds of it, I'm guessing vyou might have to pull this off in a
few hours. If this is the case, I'd probably clone a 2.0 install on a
seperate hard disk and then test that out on another machine.
If it works, just swap your drives, notifying whatever passes for your
PROM monitor or loader of any changes it needs to know about and then boot
it. If all goes well, you can just mount your old drive onto /mnt or
something and copy stuff over (config files, licensing, etc.) to
taste/need.
The key to anything like this is planning. Memorize the install dox for
your particular config and *ALWAYS* give yourself a way to bail and
recover back to the old system.Scope it out in enough detail ahead of time
and you can probably have it booting 2.0 with only about an hour of
downtime.
You've neglected to mention your architecture("Debian:It's not just for
Intel anymore!") so I'm afraid I can't be any more specific than that.
HTH,
Armadillo
--
Unsubscribe? mail -s unsubscribe debian-user-request@lists.debian.org < /dev/null
Reply to: