Moving HDD with FreeBSD installed between machines with different hardware.

[Josh Paetzel]

<snip>

> I would like to rebuild the machine completely to exercise the knowledge I
> have gained re: FreeBSD but I can't afford for it to be down for the length
> of time it would take and I don't have a standby machine available.  So what
> I'm thinking is that I could take a spare hard drive home and pop it in one
> of my own machines, install FreeBSD on that, and then bring it back to work
> and swap the hard drive out with the one in the production machine.
> 
> What kind of problems am I letting myself in for if I go ahead with this?
> The hardware in the two machines in question is quite dissimilar.  For
> example, one's an Athlon 266 with 64MB of RAM, one's a Pentium[-something]
> 300 with 400 MB.
> 
> Here are the things that occurred to me:
> 
> One of them has an 'rl0' NIC, the other 'dc0'.  So I'd have to change the
> ifconfig_ line in /etc/rc.conf.  But would this also imply changes elsewhere
> that would have to be made?
> 
> Actually, that's all I've thought of so far.  Are there any gotchas I should
> be considering?
> 
> --
> Danny MacMillan
> 
There shouldn't be a problem if you install and run GENERIC on one machine and 
then transplant that machine's hard-drive to another machine.

/etc/rc.conf is one area to beware of, another would be ipfw/ipf having rules 
based on interfaces.  Something tells me you'll want to have a copy of 
/etc/fstab available, but I can't for the life of me think why.

Josh Paetzel