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Upgrade from 7.5 to 8.0 assistance

Upgrade from 7.5 to 8.0 assistance
« on: July 26, 2012, 05:23:18 AM »
Hi,

I was hoping someone may be able to give me a little guidance to upgrading our server.
I'm very new to Linux and our wee company in Christchurch New Zealand has grown after
the earthquakes wiped out half the city and upgrading a server has a lot more potential to
go really really bad.

I've upgrade one of our offices with ease as that had and external data drive with symlinks
so all I had to do was download the configuration file, install a new server, load the configuration
(only 2 mb) and reconnect the symlinks. easy.

Our second server has all of the data on it. I have new hardware so I can set up a new production
server with sme 8.0.  What I would like to know is if I use the "moving SME to new Hardware" Affa
contrib to move everything across will that work now that the Centos has changed too

If there is a better way could you please head me in the right direction.

Cheers
Allan

Offline Stefano

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Re: Upgrade from 7.5 to 8.0 assistance
« Reply #1 on: July 26, 2012, 09:26:17 AM »
Our second server has all of the data on it. I have new hardware so I can set up a new production
server with sme 8.0.  What I would like to know is if I use the "moving SME to new Hardware" Affa
contrib to move everything across will that work now that the Centos has changed too

I moved several SME 7.5/6 to SME 8 using affa (as per wiki howto) without any issue at all

HTH

Offline CharlieBrady

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Re: Upgrade from 7.5 to 8.0 assistance
« Reply #2 on: July 26, 2012, 08:46:53 PM »
I was hoping someone may be able to give me a little guidance to upgrading our server.
I'm very new to Linux and our wee company in Christchurch New Zealand has grown after
the earthquakes wiped out half the city and upgrading a server has a lot more potential to
go really really bad.

I suggest that you get professional assistance. There are a couple of contractors based in New Zealand providing good commercial support for SME server.

Re: Upgrade from 7.5 to 8.0 assistance
« Reply #3 on: July 27, 2012, 06:24:18 AM »
Thanks Steffano

sometimes you just need reasurance from someone whos already done it.

I have setup the new server and gone through the steps.
Will let it run overnight then finish off tomorrow.

Thanks for your help.

Charlie,

I'd be keen to get some names of contractors. I have yet to find anyone
in Christchurch. But then again it has meant I have extended my knowledge
of Linux from zero to some.


Cheers
Allan

Offline mdo

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Re: Upgrade from 7.5 to 8.0 assistance
« Reply #4 on: July 29, 2012, 11:13:28 AM »

I'd be keen to get some names of contractors. I have yet to find anyone
in Christchurch.

Hi Allan

We (TechnologyWise) have been involved with SMEserver and E-smith as its predecessor for more than 10 years. We are based in Tauranga but we have strong ties to Christchurch. We have setup, manage and maintain an SMEserver for a customer in Christchurch for several years and have a partner for local support in town.
If you are interested, please contact me via private email (sme at tw dot co dot nz).

Michael
...

Re: Upgrade from 7.5 to 8.0 assistance
« Reply #5 on: July 30, 2012, 08:16:29 AM »

The upgrade went very smoothly.

We did the first affa backup on Friday afternoon, the 400 gig of data took 5 hrs to sync
We then ran a second sync remotely on Saturday to capture work done by staff on Friday afternoon

Finally on Sunday we went into the office and did the third sync and raised the new server.
The process took less than 1hr not including the sync time on Friday.

Thanks for all of your support.

Offline ber

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Re: Upgrade from 7.5 to 8.0 assistance
« Reply #6 on: August 20, 2013, 04:21:03 AM »
Hi Allan,

I had similar issues relating to migrating to SME 8.0
Yes Affa for me is the preferred option- very stable and smooth transition.

I have also used Affa as a dedicated backup to the Production server.- its very good. I think a much better option to the standard backup feature as you could set Affa to backup every hour depending what your workload is like. Its automated and just works- I've tested the rise feature and works very well. The Affa ---undo rise feature is excellent if you need to test the integrity of the backups.

If the Production server goes down You could have the new server up and running within 20 minutes.
At worse you may not have data for the last hour before the production server was down.

Links for those in the future: https://wiki.contribs.org/Affa#Dedicated_backup_server


AKL, New Zealand.