Upgrade complete
refried.org is now running on a Dell PowerEdge SC420. 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.
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.
- 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.
- I proceeded to do another install, this time partitioning the drive like so:
- /boot on /dev/sda2
- swap on /dev/sda3
- /realroot on /dev/sda5
This is where / will end up when I'm done - / on /dev/sda6
This is a temporary root for upgrade purposes only
- Once the system is running, I installed a few utilities like dump and xfsdump.
- Power down the Dell and the old server. Replace the CD in the Dell with the 2 GB root disk from the old server.
- Boot the Dell from the SATA drive.
- Mount the old root drive and dump it to /realroot
- chroot to /realroot to install kernel-image-2.6.8-2-686.
- 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.
- Reboot using /realroot as root to make sure that worked.
- Power down everything again and plug in the 20 GB drive.
- 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.
- Copy everything from the 20 GB drive to the new 80 GB volume with xfsdump.
- Power down, plug the CD drive back in, and boot back up.
- Check that email works, then go to bed.