Robert L Cochran wrote:
Les Mikesell wrote:
Robert L Cochran wrote:
I guess I'm going to have to figure out how to do an in-place
replacement of the operating system. I can install a second physical
hard drive, install Fedora 8 or CentOS 5 on that, and then start
migrating data from the FC 2 system to the new one over several days
time. I can use grub to switch between the two.
That can work with a certain amount of downtime while you install and
juggle things although it's a lot easier if you can build the
replacement on a different machine and swap it (or the drives) into
place when everything works with a final rsync of data at the last
minute. If you plan to keep this running for years without
reinstalling, Centos would be a better choice, since you can expect
'yum update' to supply security fixes for 7 years.
Using a separate machine might be possible, yes. You are suggesting the
that I rsync specific data directories to the new drive -- I've never
done that before, but there is a first time for everything.
Yes, I like to do a clean install of the new distribution with all the
matching programs using a different hostname/ip address, do an initial
copy of the data that needs to be kept using rsync, tweak all the
configs and test as much as possible. Then when it is ready, shut down
the services on the old box, rsync again to update any changed data,
then swap the hostnames and addresses and reboot. You do have to
somewhat careful about cron jobs, the outgoing sendmail queue, etc,
where you don't want to duplicate operations when both are running and
you might have to clear the adjacent router cache to make the IP switch
work quickly. The advantage of this approach is that you have access to
all the config details on the old system, even ones best access through
a GUI, while working on the new one, and you don't have to panic if
something doesn't work - you can always turn the old one back up.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
