Topic: Migrating from 7.6 to new hardware

[judgej]

I have an ageing SME7.6 server and need to move it to both new hardware and upgrade to 8.x

My first though was to use the affa contribution, as I have used that successfully in the past. However, so far as I can see, the yum repositories for 7.6 are all gone, so I'm a bit stuck installing anything. Perhaps all the repos have just moved? Or maybe I can install the RPMs manually (tried that, but some dependancies of the affa contrib, I cannot find). Is there a alternative preferred method to migrating a 7.6 server in this state?

I tried a standard backup to a workstation, and it ran for three hours, but it does not seem to have created any files, or errors in the logs.

Or perhaps I should give up migrating in one piece, install an 8.x server and move everything over by hand (rather not though)?

Once it is on new hardware, I can upgrade it to 8.x

-- Jason

[janet]

judgej

I suggest you upgrade your current server to sme 8 using the CD release.
sme8 installs & runs on an old Celeron 500 I have, so I doubt your hardware would be that old.
Server manager & configuration changes are slow though.
Heed warnings re removing custom templates & incompatible contribs before doing the upgrade.
If you have a RAID1 system with 2 drives, remove one for safekeeping, so if anything goes seriously wrong you can revert to the old sme 7 setup & try again later.

Once sme8 is running you can then look at moving hardware.

There have been a number of recent posts (last 2 weeks or so) on this identical topic, so I suggest you go back through the forums & read all those questions & answers.

It has all been answered previously so there is no real need to repeat it here.

Depending on how much data is on your server (which you do not tell us), & the speed of your server/drives/workstation & network etc, a full backup may take 8 or 10 or 12 hours.

You are best (easiest in my opinion) to backup to a locally connected USB drive.
Create a small backup first excluding everything except /root (read the Contrib Wiki re backup with dar), to test your backup is setup & working correctly, & then change the settings back to normal & perform the full backup.

The sme7 repos have all moved to the obsolete tree, also you will see this referred to in recent posts, but look here for example
http://distro.ibiblio.org/smeserver/releases/obsolete/7.6/

[judgej]

Thanks Janet - upgrade first (with a safe backup) then move.

I didn't think I would be able to do that on the old P4 system, but if it works on a Celeron, then it sounds like the right approach, and something I can search on now.

Total data on the server is about 36G, which isn't enormous. I have other servers at the office with 250G+, so my home server will be a good test.

-- Jason

[judgej]

Well, after much fruitless searching for examples of other people doing this, I decided to just install SME 8 on the new hardware and just move accounts over manually. I'm running out of time and just needed to get this thing done.

While trying to upgrade a fresh 7.6 to 8.0, the upgrade process told me it could not read the disks, so insisted on reformatting and starting from scratch. Well, it was a fresh install so nothing was lost, but it has got me worried about the upgrade procedure.

After installing fully, it rebooted into a kernel panic while trying to mount the FS. SME 7.6 had no problems installing on this machine (both 64 bit, HP Proliant Micro Server, with two 500G hardware RAID drives).

Kind of losing my faith in SME Sever (been using it since 1999) and feel like I'm stuck down a dead-end path with no way out.

Edit: I'm trying again with the HW RAID turned off.

[Stefano]

backup (on 7.6) and restore (on 8.0 ), what else?

[judgej]

Restoring a 7.6 backup on to 8.0? That's a real thing? Well, that's opened up a whole new area to search.

I would have assumed a 7.x backup would need to be restored to a 7.x server. Being a major version number from 8.x, that would mean major differences between the servers. But then, I suppose the ibay files and email formats and structures are probably similar enough to be compatible. Maybe?

[TerryF]

Well, after much fruitless searching for examples of other people doing this, I decided to just install SME 8 on the new hardware and just move accounts over manually. I'm running out of time and just needed to get this thing done.

While trying to upgrade a fresh 7.6 to 8.0, the upgrade process told me it could not read the disks, so insisted on reformatting and starting from scratch. Well, it was a fresh install so nothing was lost, but it has got me worried about the upgrade procedure.

After installing fully, it rebooted into a kernel panic while trying to mount the FS. SME 7.6 had no problems installing on this machine (both 64 bit, HP Proliant Micro Server, with two 500G hardware RAID drives).

A little confused, did you do a new clean install of SME8 as the first para suggests? or was it a upgrade of 7.6 usiong a SME8 CD.

If the Microserver is a N36/40/54L variant have only seen one instance of issues see HERE and Bug  , many many ppl are using this hardware with success

try Re: add tthe following kernel parameters "vga=vesa nomodeset"

[judgej]

Okay, managed to do a "backup to workstation" and it worked this time. Not sure why it failed yesterday. 36Gbyte took about two hours to back up over the network.

I installed 7.6 and restored from the backup. That also seems to be successful. Restoring was faster than backing up.

Now I'm upgrading to 8.0 from the CDROM. I turned off the HW RAID on the HP Microserver, so SME Server can see two independent disks. This time the 8.0 CDROM could see the 7.6 installation, and did not insist on formatting the drives. It may still end in a kernel panic, but at least I have a backup to try from again.

If the upgrade works, then i just need to fake the external network MAC address, so the cable does not give me a new IP unnecessarily, and I should be able to plug it in, with fingers crossed. My ISP renew my IP perhaps once every six months. It is a bit of a pain putting that IP into firewalls all over the place, but at least it is only twice a year. Twice, that is, unless I plug in a card with a new MAC address, so I need to retain that, and the MAC is one thing the backup does not cover.

[judgej]

A little confused, did you do a new clean install of SME8 as the first para suggests? or was it a upgrade of 7.6 usiong a SME8 CD.

If the Microserver is a N36/40/54L variant have only seen one instance of issues see HERE and Bug  , many many ppl are using this hardware with success

try Re: add tthe following kernel parameters "vga=vesa nomodeset"

I *tried* doing an upgrade, but the SME 8.0 CDROM insisted it could not do that, and had to reformat the disks. So it effectively turned into a full install. I may have more luck now I've turned off the hardware raid on the N[whatever] box (HP P/N 612275-421). I'll try those kernel parameters if it still panics (just heard the CDROM pop out at the end of the upgrade, so I'm going to go watch it boot...)

Edit: activating configuration settings - it is looking good (never got that far with the HW RAID).

Edit2: phew! worked

I have a 7.6 backed up to a workstation, a fresh 7.6 installed on new hardware, then the backup restored to that. Then the 7.6 upgraded to 8.0. I've not carried over any of the installed contribs, but I don't need them all, so I'm fine with that. I'll put it into service tomorrow and get some shut-eye now. This being a home server, I've not had to worry too much about continuity of service - it's not like when migrating using affa where you can switch over to a new server at the flick of a switch with virtually no downtime and no break in the service, which is a lot more important in an office environment, and pretty cool.

[TerryF]

I may have gone the new install route, ie install sme8 to the new hardware and restore the 7.6 backup to that, then install contribs as needed, a pretty failsafe route IMO

Anyway, looks like you have a winner, good luck

[janet]

judgej

Using hardware RAID on board is not recommended with sme due to driver issues, & many/all reports say that software RAID is better.
Just because sme7 (older CentOS) supports the RAID hardware does not mean that sme8 (newer CentOS version) will support it.
That sort of issue has been reported here many times.

Your sme7.6 old server would probably have upgraded to sme8 with no problems had you not had hardware RAID enabled.

Yes between major version (ie 7.x to 8.x) backup & restore is supported, that's a major feature of sme for many many years, probably since inception.

As you have restored the sme7.6 backup to a fresh clean OS install of sme8 on new hardware, then all your contribs data & settings will have been restored too.
When you reinstall the "old" contribs you want onto the new server, then they should pick up the old (restored) data immediately, assuming no major changes have been made to the particular contrib function, design & database etc. That's also another good feature of sme that has been around for many many years.

Re your office upgrade to sme8, do you plan to use new hardware or existing hardware ?
A CD upgrade should go OK to existing hardware assuming it is compatible, so check first.
You can also remove a RAID1 software drive for safe keeping and/or test run upgrades if the office server is configured that way.
I am not referring to hardware RAID1 drives.

You did not need to search the forums, all you had to do was review the last 2 or few weeks or so of posts in the sme7 & sme8 forums, just go through them one by one in reverse order & you will find what I was referring to. Just look at all my posts if you cannot find what I am referring to.

[judgej]

Not a moment too soon - the hottest day of the year so far, and the WAN network card broke. The old server was slow, noisy, and had a temporary power supply hanging out the side as the old one had recently failed. The new HP Microserver is whisper-quiet, fast, and is now on SME 8.

I turned off the hardware RAID in the BIOS, and the SME 8.0 upgraded the SME 7.6 without any issues. I had originally left it on, thinking I could make use of the hot-swap capabilities without SME even knowing, but that's no great loss.

Last year I did try putting SME on the box as a virtual machine running under some version of VirtualBox. It worked, but I felt it was a bit cludgy - just too many ends that needed to be tied up for it to work, and too many things that could come unstuck. In a corporate environment I'm sure it would be ideal, but I just wanted a simple reliable (and I have been running since e-smith 4.1.2 from the PC Plus cover CDROM, so yeah, I know it "just works") and opted against burying SME under too many layers of virtualization. With SME 8 as the base OS on the server, I am hoping I can run some virtual machines within it for development purposes. Gone are the days when we had to keep setting up separate boxes for each project.

I'll follow your recommendations for upgrading the other SME servers I have out in the field. Before taking out a RAID disk, I would give them a good scan though. I have found in the past that some sectors could go bad on some disks without it being detected by SME, only to be found when you try to migrate to new hardware and find it gets stuck at the same point each time. I don't know if SME 8 monitors these things better and lets you know if any sectors are remapped and which disks are starting to look a bit dodgy.

Thanks for your help, and looking forward to the next 14 years of SME Server!

-- Jason