On Thu, Jun 27, 2002 at 10:12:13AM -0600, Ashley M. Kirchner wrote: > Trevor wrote: > > > If it's that critical, build a separate server (new hardware). That way if > > everyone starts complaining, you still have a back up server. Hardware is > > dirt cheap. > > We don't have that kind of spending money just for an upgrade, specially > since after the upgrade, the extra machine will just sit there and collect > dust.
Do you have any hardware back up now? A couple of weeks ago there was a *REALLY* big bang in the night, and the next day I noticed that one of my computers was dead. Turned out to be the motherboard. Hardware can die. In this case it was the machine I have around as a backup, not my main server. (This is just personal stuff, but I as a learning experience I am pretending...) But it could well have been the main machine. Having a spare is sensible. And it need not cost much these days. As for how to do the update, I have done such a thing once. I would like to know more about how to do it. Here is what I did: My old server was on dying hardware. I bought a new box (parts from tigerdirect.com, actually--more bang for the buck that way) and installed Red Hat 7.2 on it. I took a careful inventory of what I had done on my old box. (Having kept notes of configuration and installation activity helped.) I did my best to duplicate the old configuration on the new machine--from first principles; I didn't copy any binaries from the old machine, for things like qmail and djbdns I downloaded new sources and compiled them on the new machine. Any trojan or root kit that might have slipped into the old machine had not way to propagate to the new one. I used a new password on the new machine and never typed the password on the old machine's keyboard. I did copy a big tar of /home over to the new machine. I spent quite a bit of time worrying over the new configuration. But once I was ready for the cutover, the downtime was quite short. One last copying over of changed /home files, change some IP addresses and names, and the new one was up. With the old machine still available to revert to if something didn't work. Update RPMs from Red Hat I do on the live machine. When I decide to jump to a newer release, I will likely install and build from scratch on the backup hardware and try to do another quick cutover. One problem I did have in the migration was I got UIDs/GIDs a bit confused. I think I still need to do some cleanup in that department. I will watch that issue as I tar around files next time. -kb _______________________________________________ Redhat-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
