Upgrade complete
refried.org is now running on a <a href="http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?c=us&cs=04&kc=6W300&l=en&oc=sc420&s=bsd">Dell PowerEdge SC420</a>. Did anyone notice the three hours of downtime? Hopefully you'll notice how much faster refried.org responds. I know I sure will. Read on for detail of the upgrade.
<p>Refried.org was running on a Pentium 233 MMX with 256MB of RAM. I had a 2GB root drive and a 20GB home directory drive. I replaced it with a new Dell with a 2.53GHz Celeron with 256MB of RAM and a 160 GB hard drive. Here is the procedure I used.<p>
<ol>
<li>First I wanted to make sure I could get anything running on the Dell, so I booted up the Debian installer and did a test install. The default 2.4 kernel couldn't see the Serial ATA drive. I tried the 2.6 kernel on the installer and that worked fine.</li>
<li>I proceeded to do another install, this time partitioning the drive like so:
<ul>
<li>/boot on /dev/sda2
<li>swap on /dev/sda3
<li>/realroot on /dev/sda5
<br>This is where / will end up when I'm done
<li>/ on /dev/sda6
<br>This is a temporary root for upgrade purposes only
</ul>
<li>Once the system is running, I installed a few utilities like dump and xfsdump.
<li>Power down the Dell and the old server. Replace the CD in the Dell with the 2 GB root disk from the old server.
<li>Boot the Dell from the SATA drive.
<li>Mount the old root drive and dump it to /realroot
<li>chroot to /realroot to install kernel-image-2.6.8-2-686.
<li>Fix up config files in /realroot so it's mounting /dev/sda instead of /dev/hda and using the tg3 network driver instead of 3c59x.
<li>Reboot using /realroot as root to make sure that worked.
<li>Power down everything again and plug in the 20 GB drive.
<li>Remove the temporary root partition and repartition the drive to use LVM on the 153 GB that wasn't allocated yet. Then I made a 80GB logical volume for /home.
<li>Copy everything from the 20 GB drive to the new 80 GB volume with xfsdump.
<li>Power down, plug the CD drive back in, and boot back up.
<li>Check that email works, then go to bed.
</ol>
