Shawn wrote:
I have to say, this is one of the coolest server installs I've done!
I sitting at my Suse workstation, and have an SSH console session to my
server. I have added my new target drive to the box (though I could have
just repartitioned the existing drive with "parted") and can access it as
device /dev/hdc. I ran fdisk on the new drive, and built the partitions I
wanted, then made the appropriate file systems. Next I set up a couple of
working directories on the current drive so I could mount the new partitions.
(i.e. /mnt/gentoo, /mnt/gentoo/boot, /mnt/gentoo/home). A quick run of
elinks (or any other text based browser) to the gentoo mirror at UofC and
downloaded the stage 1 tarball and unpacked it. Then chrooted to the new
partition (/mnt/gentoo as root), and began getting the other files I need
(gentoo specific stuff - emerge sync).
To paraphrase the above for those who may be a bit lost by all the
geek-speak... I installed a second drive on the server (downtime of 5
minutes) and have begun a complete installation WHILE MY SERVER IS RUNNING.
Yep, I'm sending this message out through my email server which is on the
same box, WHILE I'm installing a new server on it.
If all goes well, the only thing I will need to do is modify my boot loader a
bit, reboot the server and I'll have a brand new installation in place. I'll
be able to remove the old drive then. So, I'm estimating a total down time
of about 15 minutes, with three 5 minute intervals for reboots. And the last
one I won't HAVE to do until some other scheduled outage - so I might get
away with 10 minutes.
I think that's such a sweet way to do things! If this were an MS server, I'd
be looking at either a second physical box to emulate this, or 2-5 hours of
down time while I reinstall everything.
(apologies for the excited babble..)
Shawn
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Even better, to save processing capacity for the server job, you could
have set PORTAGE_NICENESS=19 and build a GRP packageset, and a custom
stage3 tarball. Then you could have the new system installed in a few
minutes!
But your way is cool too. Very interesting...
Regards,
Andrew
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