On Thu, Jan 08, 2004 at 03:11:33PM -0800, Alan wrote:
> Either this weekend or next I'm going to be moving my main server from
> debian unstable to gentoo stable. My reasoning is pretty simple. I've
> had more problems with debian unstable lately than gentoo stable (which
> I run on my personal webserver), nicer control of things via cflags and
> such, and gentoo provides a nicer mix between current/secure/stable than
> debian seems to. I'm looking forward to a stage 1 install on a nice
> dual CPU box (though in the interests of time I may just do a stage 3:)
>
> Anyway, I'm setting up a checklist in my mind and trying to figure out
> what I need to do and set up and back up before the move, if there's
> something I've forgotten. The box is a web/db/jabber/mail system with
> some user accounts. Anyway, this is what I'm thinking so far.
>
> - don't screw up /home (separate disk), unplug before upgrading just to
> be sure
> - backup:
> * jabber home dir (for the spool files, I'll install the gentoo jabber
> ebuild
> * /usr/local/sbin scripts
> * /usr/local/ files to sort through later
> * /etc to copy passwd/shadow/group over to retain user perms
> * apache config
> * php.ini
> * mysql binary data dir
> * postgresql binary data dir
> * /root
> * random cgi files in /usr/lib/cgi that might there
> - dump mysql/postgresql to sql files for import/backup
> - dump dpkg currently installed packages
> - list whatever has been installed via cpan from the command line
> - copy across rdiff-backup backups directory so I don't have to upload
> multi-megabytes next time my home box does it's backup
> - anything else obvious I'm missing?
I always save either /usr/src/linux/.config, or sometimes the
kernel itself and /lib/modules/2.4.../. Oh, and maybe
/boot/grub/grub.conf - if you have one.
Didn't know CPAN could list the stuff you've installed with it.
Cool!
> The next thing would be the actual set up of the system. I'd like it to
> be a pretty failsafe box, I've had mucho bad hardware karma lately, so I
> want the set up of the drives filesystems to be as rock solid as I can
> get them. I currently have:
>
> - 3x18G SCSI drives (intended for sw RAID5 on /home)
> - 4x40G IDE drives (intended for the rest of the system)
>
> What would be the best set up as far as drives go? Raid5? Raid 1+0?
> Raid 0+1? I currently have each disk split into four parts, one that's
> for / (with the other three synced each night so that they can be
> booted off of if the main hda1 goes), a swap partition, and two
> partitions for part of a raid array (md0 = hda3 hdb3 hde3 md1 = hda4
> hdb4 hde4). I'm not sure if this makes any sense now though, when I
> originally set it up I was new to raid you see.
I'm really interested in others' opinions on this one, as well.
I used Raid 5 with three SCSI disks for a while, but when one of
my disks crashed, I lost the whole thing. Somehow it got
confused and thought that the one bad drive was the only one left
that was good, and it managed to trash the filesystem somehow.
Anyway, I gave up on Linux Raid for redundancy - I'm just relying
on backups. And now I'm just running Raid0 on my two remaining
drives. Performance is hugely improved, but part of that may be
because I think the one that crashed was never working very well.
- richard
--
Richard Kilgore
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