moving linux installs

[John Abreau]

The way you describe it makes it sound like you had significant
effort and downtime to get this to work. Was it really much less
than a reinstall/reconfig would have taken?



On Sat, April 19, 2008 1:26 am, Bill McGonigle said:
> 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
>
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