Need to clone RedHat 8 on HP work stations to DL320's

[Al_56]

l am planning to clone four 32 bit work station based SCSI servers to 4 DL320's, and due to the different architectures am wondering how to go about it.

We can take server images and restore them to another like server using netcat/dd (using a knoppix boot CD) without an issue, but we have not tried to clone non like servers. These 4 servers in question are remote, and we will gain access to them next week, to l wish to have a successful plan to use before we go.

the good news is that while the systems utilize different hard drive types (the workstations use SCSI drives and the Dl320's use IDE hard drives in hardware RAID 1 via a 3ware PCI card), they are both recognized as /dev/sda by linux which shoud make it a bt easier. What we don't know is if Redhat 8.0 has the 3ware driver built into it (kernel is 2.4.18-14 if it matters).

Can anyone recommend a method of doing this? We know acronis can do this, but we don't have it, and we usually like to use open source solutions where possible.

Any gotcha's l should look for (drivers missing perhaps)?

Thanks in advance for your help and advice.

Alan

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom Alan,

Its harder but this free tool will work:

http://www.mondorescue.org

Norton Ghost will work if you can find a machine that can detect both disk drive types.

SEP

[Alan_152]

I think there would be too many changes in the kernel for this to be successful

[Al_56]

l checked the host OS and already had the 3ware driver in it, so l just updated it with the latest version for that kernel.

There may be to many kernel changes for it to work, but l'll be trying it over the next few days.

1st trying netcat/dd, and if that's a failure l'll try Norton Ghost.

l need to try to clone these servers to rackmount, and the company that built them are not sharing what changes and mods they made to get their apps to work, so a rebuild on the new servers is a very challenging option.

l'll report back soon.

Al

[Al_56]

So l tried the netcat/dd method which did work in cloning the disk (as we thought it would).

The problem is that now at boot it is looking for the drives on the aic7-xxxx (adaptec) driver, and not the 3w-xxxx driver as we'd like it to. The workstation did use the adaptec SCSI adapter so that makes sense.

Is there a way to force it to use the 3ware driver on boot?

Any other issues l could expect if we get past that issue?

If we do get past that l'm sure there will be other issues, but l'm hoping that kudzu and manually installing drivers for video and NIC cards will get us though them. This is RedHat 8.0, so l'm not expecting the system to work well so easily.

Thanks for your help and advice so far.

Alan

[Alan_152]

Do the clone, and try to boot up normally. If you manage that, the get yum, up2date, or apt-get running and update what you can.

If it won't boot normally, try getting into single-user mode, activate the networking, and do your updates.

It will be a bunch of trial and error, resolving dmesg logs, and whatnot.

[Al_56]

Thanks Alan,

If l can get beyond this boot device issue l will follow your advice.

Alan

[Alan_152]

You could, of course, install a clean RedHat 8 config onto the DL320, make sure it is running well, set up an NFS mount between the original and new box, and copy all the non-kernel files/directories from the old box to the new box.

Or, you could tar non-kernel directories and ftp the tar files over, then extract them into /.

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom Alan,

Now that I think about it further, there may be hardware difficulties in cloning a RH 8 configuration to DL320 systems.

Mondo or Ghost may do the job, but the transfer may fail due to hardware differences.

Would it not make sense to build the new systems with the latest RH 3 ES or a stable Fedora Core release and then install your applications fresh?

SEP

[Al_56]

l wish we could go with an up to date distribution. RH 8.0 is so old it's not very supportable when it comes to patching and security.

That's what we did initially. We installed CentOS 4.3, and then ported across the applications, but we coud not seem to get it right, and the vendor support was not helpful.

It seems they are trying to move their company in a different direction and the people with knowledge in that product have all left. They still take our annual support fee though ;-)

The Redhat 8 servers were using apache 1.37 with special compile options. Is there any way of knowing what options apache was installed with (l know that DSO was one of them)?

Thatnks,

Alan

[Uwe Zessin]

> Is there a way to force it to use the 3ware driver on boot?

I bet you need to put the correct device driver for your SCSI adapter into the INITRD.

[Al_56]

How do we do that?