[PLUG] Server h/w migration?

[JP Vossen <jp@jpsdomain.org>]

Looking for advice or best practices here.

I will be migrating several personal servers to new hardware over the 
next few months.  3 are Debian Etch, 1 is Ubuntu 7.10 (Mythbuntu).  The 
existing hardware is a mishmash with all EIDE, no software mirroring. 
The new hardware is PE750s, all of which have SATA drives and all will 
be mirrored.  Destination OS is 3 Debian Etch and 1 Ubuntu Hardy. 
Downtime is fine, though the less the better.  2 servers have probably < 
20G total, the other 2 have 200-400G each.

Off the top of my head I could:

1)	Do a fresh install to the new machine
	Duplicate packages
		(risk missing anything not packaged)
	rsync /etc/, data, etc. over the wire, or via USB hard drive

2)	Set up mirrored LVM partitions
	rsync over more-or-less everything
	Update fstab to handle the LVM/mirror
		Risk missing LVM/md packages


BTW, they won't be virtualized for separation of duties (LAN, DMZ) and 
physical location (local, hosted) reasons. :-)

I also see the Debian Lenny is supposed to ship in September 2008 
(http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/06/msg00000.html). 
I don't *think* I want to wait until late fall to migrate to the new 
hardware, though I might consider if someone has a compelling reason. 
Actually, 1 machine has to go to hosting sooner and 1 is trivial enough 
to not worry about, and 1 is Ubuntu, so I'm really just talking about 1 
server.  However, it's my main, critical one, with current H/W RAID, so...

Thanks,
JP
----------------------------|:::======|-------------------------------
JP Vossen, CISSP            |:::======|        jp{at}jpsdomain{dot}org
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