Migrating to a newer version of FreeBSD

[Lisa Casey]

Hi Folks,

I have had a Redhat box that was running my radius authentication and 
sendmail. Several weeks ago the hard drive in this box crashed. Naturally 
:-(  I didn't have a backup. This created an emergency - my users could not 
get authenticated and could not get email. I didn't have time to solve this 
problem nicely, so this is what I did.

I had another computer that I had installed FreeBSD 4.6 on some time ago but 
wasn't using for anything. So I hastily installed a radius server, sendmail 
and qpopper on it. Fortunately I had a copy of my radius users file, but we 
had to recreate all of the users on the box  for mail.

Right now my problems are:

1) The version of FreeBSD is just too old. The ports are old and I just 
cannot seem to just download newer ports and install them.

2) The hard drive on this box is too small. I never intended to use it as a 
mail server wehen I set it up, so my var is just way too small.

I have a new large hard drive  I purchased. I intended to install this drive 
as a slave drive in this box and copy everything over to it using dump & 
restore following the procedure at: 
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/disks.html#NEW-HUGE-DISK

I need to think about this and do it right this time. Doing things in a 
hurry on an emergency basis just causes grief. I don't want to keep the 
FreeBSD 4.6 for obvious reasons. I'm pretty sure I cannot install a 5 
version of FreeBSD on the new drive then dump/restore things over to it.

So here's what I was thinking about doing  I just ordered a copy of FreeBSD 
5.3  I can install the 5.3 on the new drive and get radius authentication 
working on that one quickly and easily. The email is going to be more of a 
problem since users currently have mail in their mail boxes on the 4.6 box 
and, of course, new mail comes in all the time. I can go ahead and get 
Sendmail and Qpopper set up on this new 5.3 box.  What do you think will be 
the best way to migrate the mailboxes over to it so as to cause our users as 
little grief as possible? Since that old redhat drive crashed our users have 
experienced a fair amount of problems and I'ld like to minimize that as much 
as I can on this new transition.

Thanks,

Lisa Casey



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