Re: [gentoo-dev] Upgrade, course of action.

[Charles Lacour <gentoo-dev@clacour.com>]

On Friday 23 August 2002 04:22, Gregg wrote:

> I run a server, it hosts 127 websites. 

Hope with that domain name that doesn't mean what I think it means... <g>

> Has many users for various other
> things.  It is currently on a celeron 600 overclocked to 675, with 256
> megs of ram.  The motherboard supports celeron and pII.  It is beginning
> to choke.  It is time to upgrade the motherboard, cpu and ram. Since this
> is an old setup (celeron and old mobo) what do I need to do when replacing
> them.  Everything is obviously compiled for it.  I have not changed any of
> my flags in the configuration files.  So it is all just i686 in the
> c*flags.  I want to go up to an athlon 2200.  So, what do I need to
> consider before switching them out, what do I need to do afterword .  This
> is a 1.3b_test system with all the latest updates (except gcc 3.2, I am
> still on 3.1.1)

I agree with some of the other posters. You're being REAL brave running that 
on a 1.3 beta. On a server, I would have definitely gone with 1.2 (and been a 
bit sweaty about the palms doing that -- Gentoo's strength is not stability 
right now.)  I hope most of those 127 sites belong to friends of yours that 
are forgiving about outages.

The one recommendation I would make would be to compile your kernel for all 
the new stuff as well as the old (I'd do it with modules), and if in doubt, 
make it a module. (You'd have to have support for modules compiled in, of 
course.)

I just had to replace a motherboard myself recently, and there were all kinds 
of little oddities I had to clean up. Having support for everything in the 
kernel will minimize your downtime getting the new box up. (I assume you want 
it up as soon as practical.)

One other little tidbit from recent personal experience. Be sure to check 
things out with hdparm once you get the new motherboard in.  My new one had 
one of my hard drives running at about 4 MB/s. After I turned on the usual 
stuff, it ran about 40.5 MB/s.  Your mileage will almost certainly vary, but 
it's always worth checking.