Topic: Simple Upgrade

[njdouglas]

Hi,

Being a newbie to SME, ihave customer running ver 6.01 who has filled the 200GB hard drive space he had in his sme.  Looking through the forums upgarding to larger drives is not an easy experience and he could really do with upgrading to ver 7.3.  Can I simply install 7.3 on two new Hard drives and copy his configuartion data over by copying it from the old server and manually entering it on the new one..  he uses the server i server mode only and only has 4 email accounts and virtual domains. 

I can then copy the ibay data and email data over using a ubuntu  live CD?

Many Thanks

[Stefano]

Hi

- install sme 7.3 on your new hw
- install Affa http://wiki.contribs.org/Affa and follow the instructions..

That's all

ciao

Stefano

[cactus]

Hi

- install sme 7.3 on your new hw
- install Affa http://wiki.contribs.org/Affa and follow the instructions..

That's all

ciao

Stefano

I think that is to shortsighted IMHO, as the upgrade instructions from SME Server 6 to SME Server 7 stated that you had to remove all contribs before upgrading to SME Server 7. By just backing up the SME6 and restoring on SME Server 7 it might very well be that the user imports some strange db entries not known to the new system.

[njdouglas]

I'm pretty sure he has no contrib's installed.  The server is used only for file serving and imap email.  Thats it.  he has 6 or so user accounts and about 146 gig sitting in a single ibay and 14 gig imap email (they are a priting company that get lots of large attachments).

As I'm not renewing the hardware, only the hard drives, I'm planning on going install 7.3 on vmware, running Affa to backup the old and restore to VMWare.  I'll then repeat the exercise from vmware to the old server with the new hdd's.

How do I check if any contrib's are installed?

Incidently as an MCSE and SBS specialist, I can't help be impressed with SME.  My customer is running his on a duron 900 with 256MB ram.  I could just see SBS trying to run on that spec!


Many Thanks

[mercyh]

If I were doing this I would copy the IBay data over to a windows workstation, POP all the mail over to the 6 e-mail clients and install the new hard drives. I would then install 7.3 and get it set up just like the old 6.x version (same users, passwords, groups and Ibays) I would then copy the Ibay data back and IMAP the mail back over out of the clients. If anything is missing just insert the old drives and get it.

If the machine spec is as old as you say, you would be doing your customer a favor by convincing him that it is time to purchase new hardware. I think you could do a low end Dell server with two drives for $600-800 US that would be more then sufficient for this situation and would restart the clock on hardware life.

[mercyh]

I can then copy the ibay data and email data over using a ubuntu  live CD?

Just FYI Ubuntu will not mount the 7.3 LVM partitions.

See here

http://forums.contribs.org/index.php?topic=41408.0

[christian]

Personally I've used the procedure:
http://wiki.contribs.org/UpgradeDisk

which has worked well for me several times and I found to be quite easy. I've used both the 6.x to 7.0 and 7.x to 7.x recipes. It is also relatively quick because you skip the need to do an initial backup and the restore is limited more by disk bandwidth than network. For 200GB that would be meaningful.

If the original server is RAID1 then the procedure is also relatively low risk.

Christian

[RedBeard]

If I were doing this I would copy the IBay data over to a windows workstation, POP all the mail over to the 6 e-mail clients and install the new hard drives. I would then install 7.3 and get it set up just like the old 6.x version (same users, passwords, groups and Ibays) I would then copy the Ibay data back and IMAP the mail back over out of the clients. If anything is missing just insert the old drives and get it.

mercyh, wouldn't copying data over to a Windows box cause problems with file permissions unless this was done when logged in as each individual user?

[mercyh]

It would depend how his data is stored. On user home directories the answer is yes. If Ibays are set to read=group, write=group it would cause no problem. read=group, write=user would cause a problem.

I think in essence what you are pointing out is that this solution was not well thought out as there are multiple scenarios that would break it.

>I would agree with your assessment and would withdraw the recommendation<

Thanks for pointing out my failed logic 

[janet]

njdouglas

The upgradedisk process is probably the simplest.

If you want to manually transfer data then read this,

http://wiki.contribs.org/Backup_server_config

and note the best way to transfer data would be by ssh'ing between boxes and using tar.gz to compress folders & files, which will retain correct permissions and ownership.