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Re: a pseudo-"clone" facility for migrating to new hardware?



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Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> On Mon, 24 Aug 2009, Joe wrote:
> 
>> My advice would be to grit your teeth and install a completely new
>> system, based on your existing packages. Then copy the data and as
>> much configuration information as possible. Sorry.
> 
>   it only just occurred to me that, yes, that's what i have to do
> since it's currently a 32-bit system and i'm moving it to a 64-bit
> server.  duh.  (yes, i know i could install a 32-bit OS but that would
> be a waste of all that 64-bit processing power.)

If you run the 64bit kernel with 32bit userland, you are not wasting too
much of that power. YMMV.

You can more or less automatically get a list of installed packages from
your existing install and feed it to aptitude on the new server. After
that you just have to copy /etc/passwd et al., only the customized
etc-files, and of course your data. I'd suggest rsync for this.

Give your new server a different hostname & ip at first, check if
everything works fine and then finally swap hostname & ip with the old
server. Shouldn't be a lot of work.

Cheers,
Johannes

NB: If old and new hardware are not to different (same architecture ;-)
), it is possible to just rsync all file systems of the old box to the
new box, adjust fstab if it needs tweaking and reboot. When my server
had some hardware problems I just took the hard disk to a different
(more modern, more capable) machine and rebooted fine.
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