Our needs evolved to require running RT and Asterisk on the system. Since they're considerably higher weight applications, I decided to upgrade the hardware.
After getting my new server, I needed to clone the linux installation. Since the old server had an IDE hard drive, and the new one was SATA, I purchased a $20 USB-SATA/IDE adapter from Amazon to help with the transition.
Step 1 - Clone Drive
I used a livecd version of gparted on my new system to clone the old drive. I used the clonezilla tool that was included to do a raw copy. The result was a new installation that was literally identical to my old one
Step 2 - Resize Partitions
Since my old server was from the dawn of the centry, the hard drive was only 60G. the new machine has a 250G drive (of course, for a fraction of the price). By doing the raw copy in step #1, the hard drive looks exactly like my old one (from a software point of view), and has a single 60G partition.
I used the gparted liveCD to resize my main partition. While I'd like to simply resize /dev/sda1, the swap partition gets in the way. As such, I needed to delete the swap partition, resize my main partition, then re-add my swap partition. To do this correctly, I had to edit /etc/fstab and update the UUID of /etc/sda5(my swap partition) with the UUID of the new partition I created
Step 3 - Fix stuff that broke
Given all the hardware in the system magically changed in an instant (from the view of the linux installation) I was quite impressed that it all booted at all. The main issue i had was getting my network interfaces to work.
Linux keeps track of network adapters by MAC address. I had to edit /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules to update the network interfaces with the new cards and remove the old ones (from the previous system).
After that little update, everything really just worked! It was quite impressive! I finally did a distribution upgrade that broke some perl modules and apache configuration bits, but all in all, not bad.
No comments:
Post a Comment