Date: Fri, 13 May 2005 17:17:39 -0500 From: Kevin Kinsey <kdk@daleco.biz> To: Lisa Casey <lisa@jellico.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Migrating to a newer version of FreeBSD Message-ID: <42852783.90504@daleco.biz> In-Reply-To: <007801c557ff$51caf660$d580a23f@lisac> References: <007801c557ff$51caf660$d580a23f@lisac>
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Lisa Casey wrote: > Hi Folks, > > I have had a Redhat box that was running my radius authentication and > sendmail. Several weeks ago the hard drive in this box crashed. Naturally > :-( I didn't have a backup. This created an emergency - my users > could not > get authenticated and could not get email. I didn't have time to solve > this > problem nicely, so this is what I did. > > I had another computer that I had installed FreeBSD 4.6 on some time ago > but wasn't using for anything. So I hastily installed a radius server, > sendmail and qpopper on it. Fortunately I had a copy of my radius users > file, but we had to recreate all of the users on the box for mail. > > Right now my problems are: > > 1) The version of FreeBSD is just too old. The ports are old and I just > cannot seem to just download newer ports and install them. > You could upgrade in a few jumps to 4.11, but I feel your pain. I've a box now at 4.11, and I really want it to go to 5.4, but I'll have to pretty much just put a new box in there, partially for personal reasons. Seems a shame, but this man's gotta do what this man wants to do ;-) .... > 2) The hard drive on this box is too small. I never intended to use > it as a mail server wehen I set it up, so my var is just way too small. > There's some alternatives there, too, if any space is available some other place. A symlink of /var/mail --> /usr/mail, for example? Or, growfs(8) into some unpartitioned space? > I have a new large hard drive I purchased. I intended to install > this drive as a slave drive in this box and copy everything over to > it using dump & restore following the procedure at: > http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/disks.html#NEW-HUGE-DISK > > > I need to think about this and do it right this time. Doing things in > a hurry on an emergency basis just causes grief. I don't want to > keep the FreeBSD 4.6 for obvious reasons. I'm pretty sure > I cannot install a 5 version of FreeBSD on the new drive then > dump/restore things over to it. It would depend on which partitions you dumped and restored, and a bunch of stuff like that. For the most part, you're quite correct. If you did a complete dump and restore, at best you'd get a 4.6 system on a new HDD, but more likely, you'd get a big headache. I might suggest just setting up the new box, installing the 3rd party stuff, announcing a scheduled maintenance outage, then quickly slaving in the old drive and simply copying things like /var/mail, password files, necessary conf files (most of which could be moved ahead of time, I'd think). You could even do the transfers via FTP, sftp, NFS, etc. The main thing would be that the old box should be off the Net at the time, and the new one, also. Keep in mind that most MTA's on the 'Net at large will keep trying at least 4 hours before anything starts issuing bounce warnings, so you've got a pretty good window. If you do it around 3 a.m., the only people up are the spammers and your Eastern European or Indian customers, anyway ;-) (Of course, I've no idea where you are nor who you serve...) I'm sure that other, more experienced sysadmins might have some even better thoughts. > > So here's what I was thinking about doing I just ordered a copy of > FreeBSD 5.3 I can install the 5.3 on the new drive and get radius > authentication working on that one quickly and easily. The email > is going to be more of a problem since users currently have mail > in their mail boxes on the 4.6 box and, of course, new mail comes in > all the time. I can go ahead and get Sendmail and Qpopper set up on > this new 5.3 box. What do you think will be the best way to migrate > the mailboxes over to it so as to cause our users as little grief as > possible? Since that old redhat drive crashed our users have experienced > a fair amount of problems and I'ld like to minimize that as much as I > can on this new transition. As I mentioned above, shutting down the SMTP service and the POP service and copying files would probably work without issue, unless you have a huge /var/mail (which I guess is possible). Giving us more of an idea of how much mail is needing to be transferred might help. I could say for sure that NFS would be preferable to FTP or sftp ;-) Good luck! Kevin Kinsey
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