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Pre upgrade ponderings

Offline david000

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Pre upgrade ponderings
« on: August 06, 2021, 04:28:05 PM »
I'm looking at migrating to SME10 but have a couple of questions first.

I have server manager backups scheduled everyday to network storage. According to the documentation I should be able to install SME 10 and restore from one of these.  Are there any pit falls in this approach ?

I currently have 2 identical machines, one of which is an Affa backup to supplement manage back up. My loose plan is to take the backup machine and use it to upgrade to 10 and if all looks good use it as the production machine.  I can then hopefully set up an affa backup when I've upgraded the second machine.

My concern is that the machines in question are somewhat old - 2007 spec Dells (Athlon 64 X2 5000+ 2.6 GHz) but with additional memory and additional HDD for Raid.  The system is currently using 65GB of disk space across 5 users.     

Too old - or OK on the basis it still works ?

Any comments \ thoughts appreciated.
 

Offline Jean-Philippe Pialasse

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Re: Pre upgrade ponderings
« Reply #1 on: August 06, 2021, 05:36:26 PM »
globally this is a good plan. test before going live.


you will have to test to see how the hardware is supported. The installer is likely to be the pitfall. it tends to support less hardware than what would support the final software. 

Network backup could be used to restore from the manager. I would  however suggest to make a console backup as it should be faster to restore from local rather than network. 

Offline david000

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Re: Pre upgrade ponderings
« Reply #2 on: August 06, 2021, 05:49:35 PM »
Network backup could be used to restore from the manager. I would  however suggest to make a console backup as it should be faster to restore from local rather than network.

ok - I guess plugging in a removable USB hard drive should facilitate that ?  Taking a quick look now, the console asks you plug in removable media before scanning for it.

Offline Jean-Philippe Pialasse

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Re: Pre upgrade ponderings
« Reply #3 on: August 06, 2021, 10:21:19 PM »
if already plugged just ignore the message and proceed. 


use usb2 at least or it will be really looooooooooooong. 


also try to update to last available version before backuping. we did few e-smith-backup upgrade in the last year that could potentially be helpful.

if you have yum erroring not able to find valid repos. disable all repos except smeupdates and update smeserver-yum first.

Offline david000

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Re: Pre upgrade ponderings
« Reply #4 on: August 07, 2021, 05:51:01 PM »
Thank you. Good point on the usb2.

I'll give it a go and see how I get on.

Offline sages

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Re: Pre upgrade ponderings
« Reply #5 on: August 08, 2021, 07:38:28 AM »
My 2c worth.
Seriously consider separating the OS and data onto different drives. The install and update was a fairly quick process, backing and restoring the data was painful and I had about  1TB of data.
I did a server upgrade at the same time. Due to the time to backup data I decided to leave my SME9 running until I had my new sever online. And I wanted to reuse the drives in my SME9 which was set up with raid 1/2 drives only. So I had to migrate my sme9 to another drive, recover the drives, build a new sme10 and restore data.
Pretty much used up a week as my backups (tried USB(old hardware only supported usb2), nfs, aoe, took best part of a day for a backup then another day for a restore) with hindsight if adding another drive to the server had been an option then I'd have used that.
Given that I only do a server upgrade every 4-5 years  :P it isn't the end of the world but I'm heading down the path of an ~120GB ssd for the operating system and two rust drives in raid 1 for data mounted at /home/e-smith/files/shares (or ibays) depending upon where you keep your data.
Any upgrade or OS rebuild should just require a relatively quick process as the main data drives would be untouched. I believe that there is a few other install out there with this setup. ymmv
...

Offline TerryF

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Re: Pre upgrade ponderings
« Reply #6 on: August 08, 2021, 09:28:36 AM »
And what you describe is my setup, was on old sme9 system made the move simple, sans raid on data drives

I removed data drives from fstab, restart and backed up that, restore to new sme10, add fstab entry restart reinstall contribs.

Does the job
« Last Edit: August 08, 2021, 09:32:11 AM by TerryF »
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Offline Jean-Philippe Pialasse

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Re: Pre upgrade ponderings
« Reply #7 on: August 08, 2021, 04:57:43 PM »
I second the advice.  ;)

Offline david000

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Re: Pre upgrade ponderings
« Reply #8 on: August 09, 2021, 06:06:48 PM »
Thanks Sages, Terry.

It seems that the PC boxes only have old slow USB ports so as you say,  backing up to a portable drive could be a slow process.

I have raid 1 configured on the boxes so do have a 'spare' drive on the second box.  In the console screen they are described as md0 and md1.   

This could give the option of separating out the data and the OS and ditching the raid configuration until I upgrade the box.   

As mentioned, I do have daily Grandfather, farther, son backups sent to a network drive.

I'm not super technical with Linux so please excuse my inability to 'join the dots' on this (let alone type meaningful command line stuff !).

Terry, are you saying that because you were running separate OS and data drives, you basically backed up the data drive 'just in case' but were able to use it directly once the OS drive was updated to 10 ?

If so, it seems to make sense to work out how to separate out the data from the OS onto the separate drives I have ?

Given the second box I have is an 'Affa' back up, perhaps one option would be to 'raise' it and try the modification and update on that box ? 

One potential issue should it all go poo poo is that I have some ibay data I'd like to keep.





Offline TerryF

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Re: Pre upgrade ponderings
« Reply #9 on: August 11, 2021, 02:12:00 AM »
Terry, are you saying that because you were running separate OS and data drives, you basically backed up the data drive 'just in case' but were able to use it directly once the OS drive was updated to 10 ?

If so, it seems to make sense to work out how to separate out the data from the OS onto the separate drives I have ?

Given the second box I have is an 'Affa' back up, perhaps one option would be to 'raise' it and try the modification and update on that box ? 

One potential issue should it all go poo poo is that I have some ibay data I'd like to keep.

Didn't even backup the data drive, just disable the fstab entry for it, did the backup of the system, remove all HDs from box
new ssd - install sme10 and at prompt during first reboot offer the sme9 backup, all good, once sme10 is rebooted and updated, put data drive back in box

edit fstab and enable the data drive, reboot, reinstall contribs..

Probably dont need to remove the data drive, just being careful  All up an hour or so, OS backup was about 45mb, data drive is almost 700gb :-)
« Last Edit: August 11, 2021, 02:14:02 AM by TerryF »
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Offline TerryF

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Re: Pre upgrade ponderings
« Reply #10 on: August 11, 2021, 02:21:23 AM »
Thanks Sages, Terry.

If so, it seems to make sense to work out how to separate out the data from the OS onto the separate drives I have ?

Given the second box I have is an 'Affa' back up, perhaps one option would be to 'raise' it and try the modification and update on that box ? 

One potential issue should it all go poo poo is that I have some ibay data I'd like to keep.

When I setup the data HD and setup fstab, I followed the wiki, once I rebooted I simpley copied all of the data from the sme9 system from the following as that was what I had setup in fstab  /home/e-smith/files/shares  I used cli and switches to also copy perms/dirs etc, then deleted the original data location, backup was then the 45mb, of course made sure data on data drive was all there before the big D :-) and accessable

this is my fstab entry, I use the UUID instead of vol name etc, going back probably would do ext4 or xfs now

UUID=566cf197-313c-4109-95f7-155d4913a747 /home/e-smith/files/shares  ext3    usrquota,grpquota,,noatime,acl        0 0

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Offline david000

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Re: Pre upgrade ponderings
« Reply #11 on: August 11, 2021, 09:49:30 AM »
Didn't even backup the data drive, just disable the fstab entry for it, did the backup of the system, remove all HDs from box, new ssd - install sme10 and at prompt during first reboot offer the sme9 backup, all good, once sme10 is rebooted and updated, put data drive back in box

Got it.

I'll have a read of the wike and see how it looks.

Offline sages

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Re: Pre upgrade ponderings
« Reply #12 on: August 11, 2021, 10:09:43 AM »
Thought I'd finally change the config on my server to separate the data onto the raid 1 drives and load the OS onto a ssd.
Bit of a hardware saga. I nutted out a procedure to hopefully allow moving data and reconfiguring things and just degrading the original raid array and then building a new degraded array, copy data from drive to drive and finally rebuilding adding the remaining original raid disk into a new array. Basically avoiding data backup to external storage.
Best laid plans.
I knew my motherboard only had two sata ports (sata 2 as it turns out) so added a dual pcie sata 3 card. Debated where the new ssd should be fitted. ie onto one of the motherboard sata 2 ports or onto the sata 3 add on ports. Finally decided that the hdd should stay on the sata 2 ports as they weren't fast enough to benefit from sata 3 and the ssd would maybe benefit from it. Turns out the motherboard won't let me select the add on sata 3 card as a boot option.
It all seemed much easier before I pulled the hardware apart.  :?
Now I need to move some cables around to reconfigure the drives and see what limitations (if any) moving the ssd onto a sata 2 port will have.
...

Offline TerryF

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Re: Pre upgrade ponderings
« Reply #13 on: August 11, 2021, 10:29:04 AM »
Now I need to move some cables around to reconfigure the drives and see what limitations (if any) moving the ssd onto a sata 2 port will have.

I had hells own trouble recently when I tried to use  a new samsung 883 DCT and then a 870 EVO to upgrade to SME10 on my little N54L microserver, fail, could install but then suffered with sata errors, poor little thing was to slow :-)

Went back to a Seagate Barracude SSD, no probs.

It was just the age of my hardware
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Offline Jean-Philippe Pialasse

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Re: Pre upgrade ponderings
« Reply #14 on: August 11, 2021, 01:56:09 PM »
good advice from Terry to remove or at least unplug the data drive to avoid the installer to erase it, and plug it back after the install is successful.