[gentoo-dev] Upgrade, course of action.

[gentoo-dev] Upgrade, course of action.

[Gregg]

I run a server, it hosts 127 websites.  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)

Gregg

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

[Michael Monsen]

While visiting the prison at D'Ni on Fri, 23 Aug 2002 04:22:49 -0500
(CDT), "Gregg" <gregg@sc.am> was overheard saying to the guard:

>I run a server, it hosts 127 websites.  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'm new to the list and Gentoo, but I would think that your new Athlon
would run the i686 binaries without trouble at all.  If I were in your
position I'd do the hardware upgrade and then after the upgrade, change
the flags to Athlon optimizations.  As you upgrade packages your system
will slowly convert over to Athlon-specific binaries.

	Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong!

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

[Michael Monsen]

While visiting the prison at D'Ni on Fri, 23 Aug 2002 04:22:49 -0500
(CDT), "Gregg" <gregg@sc.am> was overheard saying to the guard:

>I run a server, it hosts 127 websites.  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'm new to the list and Gentoo, but I would think that your new Athlon
would run the i686 binaries without trouble at all.  If I were in your
position I'd do the hardware upgrade and then after the upgrade, change
the flags to Athlon optimizations.  As you upgrade packages your system
will slowly convert over to Athlon-specific binaries.

	Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong!

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

[Dominik Westner]

It should work out of the box for the Athlon. You might need to do the 
usual stuff when you get new hardware, compile new kernel ... ;-)

If you want to have a Athlon optimizied system (should be worth when 
using gcc-3.x ... at least people tell me), you can have a look at:

http://gentoo.zhware.net/fuq.html

which mentions a couple of methods how to recompile your whole system.

Btw. I use the following for my Athlon XP 1800:

CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu"
CFLAGS="-march=athlon-xp -mmmx -msse -m3dnow -mfpmath=sse 
-fomit-frame-pointer -O3 -Wall -pipe"
CXXFLAGS="-march=athlon-xp -mmmx -msse -m3dnow -mfpmath=sse 
-fomit-frame-pointer -O3 -Wall -pipe"

with gcc-3.2.

Greetings

Dominik


On Freitag, August 23, 2002, at 06:31 PM, Michael Monsen wrote:

> While visiting the prison at D'Ni on Fri, 23 Aug 2002 04:22:49 -0500
> (CDT), "Gregg" <gregg@sc.am> was overheard saying to the guard:
>
>> I run a server, it hosts 127 websites.  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'm new to the list and Gentoo, but I would think that your new Athlon
> would run the i686 binaries without trouble at all.  If I were in your
> position I'd do the hardware upgrade and then after the upgrade, change
> the flags to Athlon optimizations.  As you upgrade packages your system
> will slowly convert over to Athlon-specific binaries.
>
> 	Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong!
> _______________________________________________
> gentoo-dev mailing list
> gentoo-dev@gentoo.org
> http://lists.gentoo.org/mailman/listinfo/gentoo-dev

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

[Alexander Gretencord]

On Friday 23 August 2002 11:22, Gregg wrote:
> I run a server, it hosts 127 websites.  Has many users for various other

And you really host that on a gcc 3 system ? Brave :)

> 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)

Just leave it "as is" and upgrade your hw. You can of course try to compile 
your system with athlon optimizations afterwards but that's even more brave 
than simply running a production system on gcc3 :)

Btw. for servers more CPUs is better than one fast CPU. Think about it: One 
fast CPU you have to serve 2 requests. One request gets the CPU for time x 
then the sheduler decides that the second request gets cpu time and so forth 
until both requests are served. With 2 CPUs both requests can be served in 
parallel (really parallel not that pseudo parallelism the sheduler gets out 
of your one cpu).


Alex

-- 
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety 
deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Benjamin Franklin

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

[Gregg]

Lets say this is a learning experience.  I feel like learning to be brave
than learning to be behind (why I chose gentoo over debian.)  :)

Gregg

> On Friday 23 August 2002 11:22, Gregg wrote:
>> I run a server, it hosts 127 websites.  Has many users for various
>> other
>
> And you really host that on a gcc 3 system ? Brave :)
>
>> 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)
>
> Just leave it "as is" and upgrade your hw. You can of course try to
> compile  your system with athlon optimizations afterwards but that's
> even more brave  than simply running a production system on gcc3 :)
>
> Btw. for servers more CPUs is better than one fast CPU. Think about it:
> One  fast CPU you have to serve 2 requests. One request gets the CPU for
> time x  then the sheduler decides that the second request gets cpu time
> and so forth  until both requests are served. With 2 CPUs both requests
> can be served in  parallel (really parallel not that pseudo parallelism
> the sheduler gets out  of your one cpu).
>
>
> Alex
>
> --
> "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
> safety  deserve neither liberty nor safety."
> Benjamin Franklin
>
> _______________________________________________
> gentoo-dev mailing list
> gentoo-dev@gentoo.org
> http://lists.gentoo.org/mailman/listinfo/gentoo-dev

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

[Charles Lacour]

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.

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

[Gregg]

Everyone keeps telling me how brave I am.  I have to say, it doesnt seem
that way to me.  Ive got a second drive (exact mirror of the first, same
size) rsyncing every night (over to another server).  That is my current
backup solution.  I havent had to go to it once.  Since I set this up as a
server and started getting these users I havent had a single outage that
wasnt a problem with power (we had 2 real bad storms over the last month
that took out power for 5 hours each, my UPS only does 3 hours tops for
the 3 systems it runs.)  Other than that, it has run flawless, and you
want brave.  emerge -up world shows nothing right now.  It is as up to
date as possible without gcc 3.2.  Not a single problem.

Gregg



> 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.

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

[Paul]

Gregg <gregg@sc.am>, on Sat Aug 24, 2002 [12:24:53 AM] said:
> Everyone keeps telling me how brave I am.  I have to say, it doesnt seem
> that way to me.  Ive got a second drive (exact mirror of the first, same
> size) rsyncing every night (over to another server).  That is my current
> backup solution.  I havent had to go to it once.  Since I set this up as a
> server and started getting these users I havent had a single outage that
> wasnt a problem with power (we had 2 real bad storms over the last month
> that took out power for 5 hours each, my UPS only does 3 hours tops for
> the 3 systems it runs.)  Other than that, it has run flawless, and you
> want brave.  emerge -up world shows nothing right now.  It is as up to
> date as possible without gcc 3.2.  Not a single problem.
> 
> Gregg
> 
	Hi Gregg;

	There is a cliche 'fools rush in where angels fear to
tread.'
	If you 'emerge -u world' tommorow, and critical systems
suddenly fail due to any number of reasons, including your
CFLAGS settings, or USE variables, or just a bad ebuild, then
what? A brave person sees this and goes ahead anyway. 'It has
worked good so far, so it must be safe' isnt quite the same
thing.
	Gentoo cannot make claims thus far about the kind of
reliability you seem to expect. If it doesnt deliver, please
dont malign it...

Paul
set@pobox.com
	
	

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

[Thomas M. Beaudry]

> Everyone keeps telling me how brave I am.  I have to say, it doesnt seem
> that way to me.  Ive got a second drive (exact mirror of the first, same
> size) rsyncing every night (over to another server).  That is my current
> backup solution.  I havent had to go to it once.  Since I set this up as a
> server and started getting these users I havent had a single outage that
> wasnt a problem with power (we had 2 real bad storms over the last month
> that took out power for 5 hours each, my UPS only does 3 hours tops for
> the 3 systems it runs.)  Other than that, it has run flawless, and you
> want brave.  emerge -up world shows nothing right now.  It is as up to
> date as possible without gcc 3.2.  Not a single problem.
> 
> Gregg


I'm agreeing with you Gregg.  The office server I admin has had no 
problems in almost a year save power outages.  While not as up-to-date 
as yours, it is more recent than a stock 1.2 installation.  There is 
nothing wrong with the stability of Gentoo.  The only problem is that 
Gentoo requires you to use your brain else it will happily let you shoot 
yourself in the arse.  Once you get your server running the way you 
like, just keep your hands off of it.  Just because Gentoo puts out 
software upgrades as soon as they are available does not mean that you 
have to install them.  I only upgrade software on the server when it 
fixes a problem that affects me or provides a new feature that I need.

What I don't need is a distro telling me what versions of software that 
I can or cannot run.  If I wanted that, I'd be running Debian or Suse or 
whatever.  One of the points of Gentoo is that you make your box the way 
that you want it.  So if you want a stabile box, set it up and then 
leave it alone.  And don't whine because Gentoo releases a new version 
of software with less testing than you care for.  They're providing for 
others to make their boxes the way they like them as well.  What?  That 
newly released update has a feature that you need but you're afraid to 
install it because the developers didn't do enough testing on it first? 
  Be glad they did release it.  Dozens of guys that enjoy living on the 
edge will get it tested faster than the developers could have done on 
their own.  Just sit back and monitor the lists until you're satisfied 
that the new release is usable for you.

Ok, off my soapbox for now...

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

[Alexander Gretencord]

On Saturday 24 August 2002 07:24, Gregg wrote:
> Everyone keeps telling me how brave I am.  I have to say, it doesnt seem
> that way to me.

Sure, backup solutions are bought after the first real big crash, security 
measures are taken after one billion credit card numbers have been stolen 
etc. you get the picture. I have absolutely no idea what kind of customers 
you have but I wouldn't want to have my domain hosted on a system running on 
gcc 3.1 and all the latest packages.

It's great for me at home but for serious computing it's just not reliable 
enough. I don't say it has to crash but I say I don't know enough working 
examples and theres no vendor to blame.

Sure you've had no real outage (due to gentoo), many ppl never had problems 
with xfs, I lost part of my homedir. On the other hand I never had problems 
with reiserfs even when it wasn't in the main kernel others lost everything. 
It's all about the risk.

Gcc 3.1 is not as tested as it should be (heck 3.1 is not even the "real" 3.x 
release) and some software is behaving strangely especially with athlon 
optimizations. Gentoo itself is known to have broken ebuilds etc. (I've yet 
to emerge one of those myself so far everything has worked).

That's why we say brave. It's really great to have someone testing all this 
out but I just wouldn't test it on paying customers that don't know about all 
this. You do know about "production", "integration" and "testing" systems? :)


Alex

-- 
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety 
deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Benjamin Franklin

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

[Gregg]

Im glad to be testing it :)

Yes I know about production and testing systems.  I have a backup solution
already in place, nearly hot-swapable.  Ive been programming as a
consultant for 9 years.  I know what risks I am taking.  But I honestly
cant stand redhat, and mandrake is just to much bloat.  Stable debian is
just out of date.  Most of my users are rather intelligent people, half of
them linux users themselves.  They know what I am doing.

Gregg

> On Saturday 24 August 2002 07:24, Gregg wrote:
>> Everyone keeps telling me how brave I am.  I have to say, it doesnt
>> seem that way to me.
>
> Sure, backup solutions are bought after the first real big crash,
> security  measures are taken after one billion credit card numbers have
> been stolen  etc. you get the picture. I have absolutely no idea what
> kind of customers  you have but I wouldn't want to have my domain hosted
> on a system running on  gcc 3.1 and all the latest packages.
>
> It's great for me at home but for serious computing it's just not
> reliable  enough. I don't say it has to crash but I say I don't know
> enough working  examples and theres no vendor to blame.
>
> Sure you've had no real outage (due to gentoo), many ppl never had
> problems  with xfs, I lost part of my homedir. On the other hand I never
> had problems  with reiserfs even when it wasn't in the main kernel
> others lost everything.  It's all about the risk.
>
> Gcc 3.1 is not as tested as it should be (heck 3.1 is not even the
> "real" 3.x  release) and some software is behaving strangely especially
> with athlon  optimizations. Gentoo itself is known to have broken
> ebuilds etc. (I've yet  to emerge one of those myself so far everything
> has worked).
>
> That's why we say brave. It's really great to have someone testing all
> this  out but I just wouldn't test it on paying customers that don't
> know about all  this. You do know about "production", "integration" and
> "testing" systems? :)
>
>
> Alex
>
> --
> "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
> safety  deserve neither liberty nor safety."
> Benjamin Franklin
>
> _______________________________________________
> gentoo-dev mailing list
> gentoo-dev@gentoo.org
> http://lists.gentoo.org/mailman/listinfo/gentoo-dev

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

[Thomas M. Beaudry]

> (heck 3.1 is not even the "real" 3.x release)

What do you mean by this?   That there was never an official
3.1 release by the GCC people?

-- 
Thomas M. Beaudry
k8la / ys1ztm