Hi,

I have an existing proxy server which connects to my main office in London. I would like to move this server to a guest in Xen environment. Is it possible to clone the image over?




Or i can install the proxy server on the guest and copy some relevant files? But please note that the environment is slightly different

Old Server: Redhat 4 with proxy 5.1
New Xen guese: Redhat 5


Are there any one who can assist me on this? Or are there any detailed guides on this?

I can't seems to find it on RHN.

Will appreciate any help. Thanks!

I would copy the configuration files over and install all software as on the old one (rpm -qa).
Start the services and test if everything is working as expected.
Do one service at a time and look in the log files to see if any configuration directives have changed or are invalid.
I do not understand how you want to copy the image over.
I think it is better to use a clean install. But probably the image will run (you can just try it if you deny traffic from the clone until you are sure it is working)

Hi,

Thanks for the reply.

Initially i thought about doing the same. But the OS version is different. i tried to copy some files over but there were some that weren't existent on the new server. And at the same time, the i would need to change the hostname to the new 1 as well. Wanted to do a test before the actual migration, but i not sure how to proceed.

Dear ALL

I think there is an explanation needed from whom who have such kind of experience.

Plz respond.

Subrun

The reason why the file doesn't exist can be due some packages which are not installed.
You don't give alot of info on what you tried. What files for example?
What services do you need to get working?

Another possibility is creating a VM. Booting it with a live cd (iso), create the partitions, mount them on for example /newroot (/newroot is / partition; /newroot/var is /var partition). Then you can copy all files for example through scp from one host to the other (or using an nfs mount; disable all_squash and root_squash then) (another way is creating a tarball with all your files and extracting it on the target VM). If desired you can upgrade that to RHEL5. But this is not how I would recommend it (just in my opinion).

If you have such an image, I would say, give it a shot and supply it as a disk image for your xen guest.

But in your post it is not clear wether your target system is a RHEL4 or RHEL5 (you ask if you can clone the image over, which is RHEL4 :s ).

If it is rhel5 I would do a clean install and then copy files.
When you have problems you can create a thread for it.

THe first to questions you have to ask yourself is:
- what target OS do I want
- what services do I want to move

I can't see how your reply will help this thread any further.

hi,
the target OS : RHEL 5
the services : Proxy service.

That is the main purpse of the migration.

I have a Xen guest built already. but not sure how to carry on from here.

I did not have any experience building any proxy server. (the old one is not built by me)

First look in the documentation how a basic setup is done for a proxy.
Install the correct packages.

After that is done, backup the original config file and copy the one from your existing server.
Then try to start the service (is this squid proxy server?).
Look at the end of /var/log/messages for errors.
If you can't find any log information check your configuration file for any custom log place.