Upgrade update

[mdlbear]

So... here's an update on this post about cleaning the office, upgrading the fileserver, and fixing the Starport's email.

One out of three is,... um,... pretty bad. I'm probably going to have to go to Plan B or Plan C on the email; I simply can't make it work at Dreamhost. Worth an email to their tech support, though.

As for the fileserver, the problem is that I really "need" to have my home directory up and running for at least most of the day. And I need to have mail working, and the YD needs to have the laser printer working.

After toying with and rejecting the idea of swapping Nova's hard drive into temporary hardware temporarily (which would involve a fair amount of work), it became clear that the right thing to do would be to pull the drive, plop it into an external box, and just do the upgrade (setting up the three SATA drives in a mixed RAID configuration). If it goes quickly and smoothly, mount the old drive and start copying /home. Whee!

If it doesn't go smoothly, mount the old drive on Dorsai, the desktop. This is almost but not quite as much work as a temporary Nova, and is only possible because Dorsai is currently the only machine mounting filesystems over NFS from Nova.

Even if I'm able to bring up Nova quickly and restore /home onto it (it's "only" 15GB, which won't take long), the next thing will be to move the external box over to Dorsai, where I can mount the big partition that has all the media files and website working directories, and still use it while rsync rumbles along doing its thing.

The nice thing about that is that if NFS or NIS gives me trouble -- and those are the two most likely trouble spots, for certain -- I can mount /home on Dorsai and go my merry way while trying to fix them.

11:35 On second thought, the best thing is clearly to start by moving the old drive to Dorsai. That will (presumably) be fairly quick, and will take all the time pressure off of the upgrade.

Comments

[phoenixpdx.livejournal.com]

What I want to know is: when did the adverb "only" become associated with a number like 15 GIGAbytes??

[mdlbear]

When you could get that much on a micro-SD card for under $40? Hence the quotes.

The raw space on the new set of drives comes to 1.5TB, so /home will occupy a mere 1% of it.