moving linux installs

[Bill McGonigle]

Wow, so today was a weird day - I wound up moving three servers onto  
different hardware, and their configuration was complex enough and  
the downtime requirements were tight enough and the budget small  
enough that a re-install and re-configure wasn't in the mix - so it  
was a 'move the hard drives and go from there' exercise, one I hadn't  
done recently.

I was fairly impressed (not in a good way) with how hard pulling  
drives from one machine and running them in another was.  initrd  
needed new drivers, modprobe.conf's needed to be updated to make that  
happen, raid arrays no longer auto-detected, grub wasn't valid, kudzu  
doesn't seem to auto-detect hardware changes anymore, and other fun  
stuff.  I still haven't completely wrapped my head around the hwconf  
database, so I've got a couple machines running on eth2 and eth3 with  
ghost eth0 and eth1's around.  Especially vexing was that it seems  
that grub needs to be run on the final destination hardware because  
of the way it does BIOS probes, so preparing the disks ahead of time  
wasn't obviously possible.  Oh, and before anybody else gets bitten,  
the Fedora 8 Live CD doesn't include md* RAID tools anymore (Live 7  
did). :(

So, at first blush, Windows and Mac OS X beat the pants off of us on  
linux, because the former has multiple hardware profiles and the  
latter just has everything built-in, making this kind of work  
reasonable to easy.   However, I notice that things like LiveCD's do  
nice auto-detection at system start and don't suffer from baroque  
machinations to get the things I described above working.

So, perhaps this problem is solved already and just not widely  
distributed.  Has anybody here figured out how to plumb hardware  
autodetection into a Redhat-line distribution (or others, I could  
switch distros over this).  Or, is there a better way that hasn't  
occurred to me?   (And yes, PXE booting with NFS-mounted everything  
of a big storage server is a good solution, but doesn't fit in the  
small educational settings I'm thinking about here).

Thanks,
-Bill

-----
Bill McGonigle, Owner           Work: 603.448.4440
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