Re: Migration of Linux Sever

[Asher Miller <Asher Miller East Sun COM>]

>I have a Linux Server installed in a Pentium II Machine and i am planning to 
migrate that server to a SUN Ultra Enterprise 450 ..
>I downloaded the ISO files for redhat 6.2 for sparc and copyed to a CD...
>
>My questions are:
>1- I know how to install linux for Intel, is it the same for SPARC, how do i 
create the startup disk (is there any startup disk????)

I'm not a big expert on this (after all--I'm a technical writer, not an IS 
person!), but from what I've seen, the SPARC installation is pretty much the 
same as the Intel installation.  The screen just looks a little different.  I'm 
not sure about autodetection of the various devices, but pretty much all the 
periperal hardware in the E450 is PCI and SCSI, so device detection should be 
fairly painless.  

I'm not sure about startup disks, but it's generally a good idea to grab the 
latest boot image from Redhat.  I don't know too much about the E450's boot 
sequence, but it should be possible to boot from floppy.  (I'm more familiar 
with Linux on Intel than Linux on SPARC.)  

Dual-booting Solaris and Linux can be a little dicey; I'm not sure if it's 
better to use the Solaris boot manager or--what is it?--SILO. (The Linux/SPARC 
boot loader.)

>2- How do i move all my configuration form one server to the other.. actually 
the server has DNS, MAIL, FTP.... which files do i have to copy for the new 
server to be exactly as the old one?????

A lot of that stuff is defined in the /etc files.  Though, I wouldn't advise 
copying over all of /etc to the new machine!  Maybe somebody else has a better 
answer...

One limitation that I've found (and I'm not sure where the root of this problem 
lies): you can only login if your UID is < 256^2 (i.e., higher than 65536).  If 
your NIS UID is higher than this, you won't be able to log in through the NIS 
server.  I'm not sure if this is a NIS limitation or a kernel limitation (I 
think it's a limitation which may be elimitated in the 2.4 kernel), but it's an 
annoying problem if you're trying to log in as an NIS client on a large network.

There are Linux-SPARC usenet groups; you could ask them, too.

Hope this helps....

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	Asher Miller
	Technical Writer 
	Sun Microsystems - WGS
	asher miller sun com
	781-442-2382
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