REDUX: Re: Migrating 32 -> 64
Thanks to everyone for the helpful input. It looks like there is no
advantage to converting to 64-bit, which is just fine with me. The new
machine has 4GB of RAM, so I am not hitting address space issues. I don't
do anything more CPU-intensive than spam filtering. I do occasionally do
some I/O-intensive stuff (particularly backups onto its external RAID),
plus I have a GigE switch, so a GigE port does matter to me.
It looks like it will be worth my while to copy partitions over to the new
disk, if only so I can increase the size of my root partition (which I
foolishly made too small). Beyond that, it looks like the transition will
be very easy. Thank you all for the guidance. Now it's time to burn a live
CD and get copying.
--Greg
On Mon, Aug 12, 2013 at 02:08:40PM -0600, Bob Proulx wrote:
> Stan Hoeppner wrote:
> > Moral of the story? The OP may need to spend ~$30 USD for an Intel
> > PCI NIC to guarantee it'll work on the first go. He probably gave not
> > much more than this for entire used machines. Factor in that you can
> > get a brand new mobo/cpu/RAM combo with GbE and GPU today for ~$100
> > USD, and spending any money for just the GbE NIC for the old machine
> > seems not a prudent investment.
>
> David Christensen wrote:
> > I agree that it's very hard to justify spending money on obsolete
> > hardware. I must have subconsciously assumed the OP had a spare
> > Gigabit NIC (I have a couple in my spare parts inventory).
>
> I agree with all of the above sentiment. Sometimes you just have to
> let go of the old hardware. But I was responding to a thread talking
> about adding a network card. Maybe I should have said _if_ you are
> going to put another network card in the box _then_ stop there.
>
> Note that it wouldn't need to be a GigE card. It seems to me that any
> old 10/100 card should be enough for this machine. I prefer the old
> tulip based cards like the Linksys etherfast ones. If you ask around
> to your friends or a local user group you can probably find one of
> those laying around unused that they would give you for free. And
> that removes the cost part from the equation.
>
> > Without a free NIC, I'd probably: back up the old box (burn to
> > optical, use external drive, whatever), build the new box, move the
> > old HDD into the new box, and proceed from there.
>
> Moving the old hard drive to the new machine for a local disk to disk
> copy to the new drive should be easy. I guess that depends upon the
> vintage of old disk though! But if I had an old 20G disk and had just
> bought a new 1T disk then I would certainly simply image the old drive
> onto the new one and set the old drive on the shelf as a backup for a
> while.
>
> In other thoughts... I agree that there isn't a reason to upgrade a
> particular system from 32-bit to 64-bit. If you have a 32-bit machine
> then I can't see any reason to upgrade to a 64-bit machine. I still
> have many 32-bit machines.
>
> However if you are building a new 64-bit machine with today's
> inexpensive ram and are putting 8G or more ram into it then I would
> definitely recommend using 64-bits for the *new* system given that it
> has much more ram in it. The PAE kernels are fine. But nothing is as
> simple as a large flat address space. Firefox is quite the pig. I
> have routinely killed it on my machine when I have seen that it is up
> around 2G in memory size. I think it is only a matter of time before
> Firefox will routinely bump against the 3G limit. Especially now that
> almost every web site is more Javascript and image intense than
> before. Past history being the imperfect predictor of the future.
> This will eventually be a 32-bit issue for FF to lean out. But of
> course a 64-bit system won't have that limitation. I still would not
> recommend (yet) to migrate an existing system from 32-bit to 64-bit.
> Maybe for Jessie it will come together however. I think that is
> actually very likely for Jessie.
>
> Bob
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