Migration

[Grant Peel]

Hi all,

I have been perstering this list quite a bit lately asking all kinds of questions about how I am going to upgrade some old versions of FreeBSD (and add 1 brand new box), without having to reinstall each port/program an all servers causing all kinds of downtime.

I may have answered my own question, but I would like to run the plan past y'all in case I am missing something. Everything I need to do may be possible by using the FreeBSIE Live CD that I am only now aware of even exists!

Senario:

I have 7 Servers, but this discussion only involves two older ones (to be upgraded), 1 new one (to be deployed), and 1 excellent one (that I want to clone).

1 old one had FreeBSD 4.7
1 old one has FreeBSD 4.10
1 brand new one has nothing.
1 Excellent machine has 6.2 RELEASE, and is in production.

All of my servers use the same filesystems structures (/ /usr /var /home and /mnt (for the netowrk shares)).

All servers are in the same location,
All are connected to a WAN (via ethernet),
All are connected to a VLAN (via ethernet).

Another machine connected the same as above has a NFS share with lots of room.

Steps:

1. Backup ALL data and put in a safe location :-)
2. Make complete file dumps of all filesystems on the machine that is to be cloned,
3. Using the live CD, create the needed file systems on the 'Blank' machine,
4. Connect the "BLANK" machine to the NFS machine  IS THIS POSSIBLE USING THE LIVE CD?
5. restore the clone dumps to the "BLANK" machine,
6. Remove all previous machine and user specific config data from the newly loaded "BLANK" machine,
7 Make a new complete set of file dumps and save to the NFS machine, (skip to step 9 for the old machines).
8. Configure and use the blank machine.
DONE

(the rest below would only apply to the two OLD machines being upgraded),

9. Using the live CD, redo the drive repartition and disklabel newfs etc, to get pristine drives,
10. connect OLD machine to NFS.
10. Using the dumps made in step 8, load the new OS,
11. Using the backed up data from step 1, reload the /home, redo rc.conf, and a bunch of other user type data...
12. Test and fix the minor forget me nots ....
(DONE)


repeat steps 9-12 for other old machine.

>From what I can see, some of my virtual passwd files will still work (from 4.7 + 4.10 TO 6.2 COMMENTS?
>From what I can see, the master.passwd $!$ passwords should work from 4.7 + 4.10 to 6.2 COMMENTS?
The old style mysql passwords should work as long as I am using the -OLD-PASSWORD option. ( I can redo the passwords if I have to anyways.

Any comments from users who have used FreeSBIE would be greatly appreciated.

-Grant







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