Migration planning - old system to new

[Erich Dollansky]

Hi,

On 24 January 2010 am 00:19:34 Jerry McAllister wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 23, 2010 at 10:15:19AM +0800, Erich Dollansky wrote:
> > On 23 January 2010 am 01:12:19 John wrote:
> > > 1) Create a "migrate" account in Wheel with home as
> > > /var/migrate so that I can do a dump/restore on "home"
> > > without messing things up
> >
> > Are you sure? Use /usr to make sure you will have enough
> > space.
>
> You are making the rash and probably incorrect assumption that
> /usr is the largest partition/filesystem.   Many people,
> including I, make /home or another partition be the large one. 
>  The OP may also have done that.

so true.
>
> > It might be easier for you to run both machines and move
> > first the simple things over.
> >
> > > 7) Nuke /home and /var/mail and migrate them again to get
> > > the latest version 8) Do the real switch
>
> Move/migrate them first.  Don't make assumptions about what the
> OP has on /home.

This was written by him not me.
>
> But, I agree, if possible, use a second machine with V 8.0
> installed and migrate to it.
>
> Otherwise, make full backups, check them for readability.  Then
> do a new install of FreeBSD V8.  Add a large disk and pull
> stuff out of your dump to it and then migrate that stuff piece
> by piece back to the machine main filesystems.

It sounds to me that his main problem is that it is a life system 
and he wants to avoid down-time. Not this easy.
>
Erich