About a year ago, I inherited system administration of my research lab's 4 linux workstations from the previous student who was leaving to take a job at Google. The 4 machines ran Gentoo, and maintenence (particularly upgrades) was a pain becuase upgrades would need to be nursed along, taking days of my time, and having very brittle dependency logic. I have been crossgrading the machines to Debian stable since Lenny's release, and have now moved 3 of the 4 machines.
The fourth machine, which I haven't touched yet, runs a MySQL database, and is the NIS server for the other three machines. I now need to upgrade these machines subject to 3 constraints: 1. The mysql database must not be lost, and I must be able to move the data reasonably quickly. (Downtime is OK since it's not public facing, and gets sporadic use, but forcing me to dump/reload would be a royal pain because one of the databases contains 15GB of linguistic data.) 2. The login information from the NIS server must not get lost. Creating new accounts, or asking users to recreate their passwords would be BAD. 3. The NIS server must be moved over without creating downtime on the other lab machines. (This is a problem because if I have to disconnect one of the machines from the network, as I had problems with Network Manager last week, it becomes difficult to do anything to fix the machine because the machine can't contact its authentication server.) Is there a way to move the MySQL server without dumping/reloading? Is there a way to replicate the the logins and passwords from the NIS server to the other machines in the lab so that the machines are still useful if the NIS server is unreachable? (Ideally I'd like to use relatively standard tools for this, and have this replication be an ongoing process.) --Ken _______________________________________________ vox-tech mailing list [email protected] http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
