From owner-freebsd-questions Tue Jan 22 21:15:45 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from post.mail.nl.demon.net (post-11.mail.nl.demon.net [194.159.73.21]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0598E37B404 for ; Tue, 22 Jan 2002 21:15:41 -0800 (PST) Received: from [212.238.194.207] (helo=tanya.raggedclown.net) by post.mail.nl.demon.net with esmtp (Exim 3.33 #1) id 16TFl5-0008vi-00 for freebsd-questions@freebsd.org; Wed, 23 Jan 2002 05:15:39 +0000 Received: by tanya.raggedclown.net (tanya.raggedclown.intra, from userid 500) id 95F99118A; Wed, 23 Jan 2002 06:15:38 +0100 (CET) Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2002 06:15:38 +0100 From: Cliff Sarginson To: FreeBSD List Subject: Reversing Linux and FreeBSD running on same system without mutual self-destruction Message-ID: <20020123051538.GA3234@raggedclown.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.3.24i Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Hello, Here is a challenge. One of the systems on my network has got to start being more useful than it has been so far (reasons I won't bother you with). Now on this system I have a UW2 SCSI disk with a Linux system on it. This runs on reiser file systems. Also on this system on AT Disks is a cuddly FreeBSD 4.5 system. Now I want to reverse this setup, most of what I have beeing doing on the Linux system has been transferred to the FreeBSD one, a few things are left to do..but that will happen. However I need to preserve the Linux system, for the forseeable future. However it will be much less used than it has been. I want the main platform of the system to be FreeBSD, I am getting sick of rebooting it every 5 minutes to do this thing on one and that on the other. This is not only for convenience but the system is shortly going to need to be online 5/7 for most of the day as part of my great scheme. Now I am trying to get my head around how to do this. I have some spare disk capacity for intermediate stages, but not endless amounts. The only external storage media I have is CD/RW. I want the FreeBSD system to end up on the SCSI disks and the Linux one on the AT disk. I cannot mount the reiser systems on FreeBSD I guess. And I have had terrible troubles mounting FreeBSD disks on Linux systems (though it is supposed to work, I could look into it again I suppose). I also of course need to build a SCSI aware BSD system, although that should be a non-problem I guess -- controller is Tekram with ncr53c895 chipset, common as muck ? I have given this a lot of thought, and it's obviously do-able. But in my attempts to do minimise the amount of work involved, and to avoid too much re-configuration I wonder if any of you can think of any tips, or how to avoid falling into a nest of vipers on the way. I am particularly concerned about the different partitioning schemes for BSD/Linux, since at some point some part of the system is going to have to be off-air (i.e. sitting on a CD-ROM hopefully not being a candidate for a coaster). When I think about this I realise why I gave up being a Unix System Manager and went back to programming :) A much less hazhardous profession, if somewhat worse paid. And before someone says "Wouldn't it have been better to have done the switch before configuring so much of BSD ?" The answer is yes, it would have been. -- Regards Cliff To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message