Hello the linux community !

Today I have a challenge: move my "old" server to a newer one.

I have a Dell PE 850 for my personnal use running on Debian Lenny (ZoneMinder, Apache, Cacti, Nagios, SqueezeCenter, Transmission, DNS, Squid, Wins and domain, MySQL, Postfix and so on) but he is overloaded now....
(2 GB Ram and one P4 HT @ 3,6 GHz, 2 SATA HDD)

And now I have another machine: Dell PE SC1425 with 4 GB Ram and two Xeon HT @ 2,8 GHz with SCSI HDD and hardware RAID.

My idea is to move my current server to the new one without re-configuring and installing everything.

The old server has software RAID on two 250 Gb SATA HDD, formated with ReiserFS and the new server has hardware RAID on two 146 Gb SCSI HDD, I'll format it with XFS

As I have a NAS, the server has not a lot of data, I use about 20 Gb on HDD (and has only one partition)

I've found a solution here: http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/...ween-computers

But before broking everything, I would ask you witch is the best and secure method to migrate my server ?

What would you use if you have to do this migration ?

Many thanks for your ideas and comments

(Sorry for my bad english)

I'd probably use rsync rather than netcat and tar, that way if something broke part-way through I could pick up where I left off without having to start again. But you would need to have ssh (or an rsync dæmon) running on the destination machine for that to work.

Note that the instructions you have are talking about copying data (eg the /home partition); they pre-suppose that you have a working operating system. You could easily do this with a live CD, but make sure you format, mount and cd to the partitions first.

If the partitions are EXACTLY the same size, then you could also use dd to grab a bite-wise copy of the entire filesystem; this would take longer to copy but you wouldn't have to format the partition.

It's always a good idea to mount a filesystem as read-only before copying it. That way, you won't get a snapshot of a file that's changing as you copy it. You can do that with this command: If you aren't able to re-mount it read-only (eg for a live server) then it's worth running fsck on the new system to make sure that there aren't any errors.

If you're copying the entire filesystem tree, then make sure to skip /proc, /sys and possibly /dev; these are auto-mounted filesystems and not stored on disk, so you don't want to copy these. You can use the mount command, or look at /etc/mtab to see which filesystems are physically stored on disk.

Hope that helps,

—Robert J Lee

Hello,

Thanks for your reply.

So you think if I install debian Lenny on the new server with ssh and rsync, I can copy all the data and remplace all files ?
Would the software raid just stop working and let the hardware raid doing his job ?

As the material configuration changes, will it not made some problems on the devices names ? (like in /dev)