[gentoo-user] Upgrade query

[gentoo-user] Upgrade query

[jdm]

A little advice please? I am about to build a new box going from athlon dual core to phenom six core. Including new sata drives and motherboard. I was going to clone all my partitions and the re emerged all packages with march native

Firstly would you reccommend cloning and if so what is best technology?

Second is a complete reinstall a better option or safer?
Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone on O2

Re: [gentoo-user] Upgrade query

[Albert Hopkins]

On Thursday, July 21 at 10:01 (+0000), jdm@jdm.myzen.co.uk said:

> A little advice please? I am about to build a new box going from
> athlon dual core to phenom six core. Including new sata drives and
> motherboard. I was going to clone all my partitions and the re emerged
> all packages with march native
> 
> Firstly would you reccommend cloning and if so what is best
> technology?

When I move to a different machine, I just

      * boot into a live cd
      * back up all the partitions with rsync (or use tar or similar if
        you need compression) to an external (USB) drive.
      * boot new machine into livcd
      * repartion, copy backed up files
      * install bootloader (and reconfigure/build kernel if necessary)

If both source and target are on the same network you can probably also
get away with rsync'ing over the LAN instead of using an external drive.

As for what "technology" is best, they are not going to make a whole lot
of difference, IMO.  I find rsync/cp easier to work with (you can
manipulate files before copying them to the new box).  tar is more
efficient if you need compression.  dd, would be the least efficient in
my opinion, because it's going to clone the entire partition, including
unused blocks, when you're really only concerned about the files.  Tools
like partimage, etc. can clone a partition "smartly" but I tend to use
those tools less often as I'm really only concerned about the files, not
the partitions.  Unless your source and target partitions are going to
have the exact same geometry, I don't see the benefit if cloning
partitions.

Just my 2¢

-a

Re: [gentoo-user] Upgrade query

[jdm]

Thanks. Rsync sounds like a good option as I can boot pc with old hard disks installed.

I assume that rsync works ok with ntfs?

Jdm
Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone on O2

-----Original Message-----
From: Albert Hopkins <marduk@letterboxes.org>
Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2011 06:18:53 
To: <gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org>
Reply-to: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org
Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] Upgrade query



On Thursday, July 21 at 10:01 (+0000), jdm@jdm.myzen.co.uk said:

> A little advice please? I am about to build a new box going from
> athlon dual core to phenom six core. Including new sata drives and
> motherboard. I was going to clone all my partitions and the re emerged
> all packages with march native
> 
> Firstly would you reccommend cloning and if so what is best
> technology?

When I move to a different machine, I just

      * boot into a live cd
      * back up all the partitions with rsync (or use tar or similar if
        you need compression) to an external (USB) drive.
      * boot new machine into livcd
      * repartion, copy backed up files
      * install bootloader (and reconfigure/build kernel if necessary)

If both source and target are on the same network you can probably also
get away with rsync'ing over the LAN instead of using an external drive.

As for what "technology" is best, they are not going to make a whole lot
of difference, IMO.  I find rsync/cp easier to work with (you can
manipulate files before copying them to the new box).  tar is more
efficient if you need compression.  dd, would be the least efficient in
my opinion, because it's going to clone the entire partition, including
unused blocks, when you're really only concerned about the files.  Tools
like partimage, etc. can clone a partition "smartly" but I tend to use
those tools less often as I'm really only concerned about the files, not
the partitions.  Unless your source and target partitions are going to
have the exact same geometry, I don't see the benefit if cloning
partitions.

Just my 2¢

-a

Re: [gentoo-user] Upgrade query

[Albert Hopkins]

On Thursday, July 21 at 11:10 (+0000), jdm@jdm.myzen.co.uk said:


Well, depends on your definition of "works".

AFAIK linux does not expose the NFTS permission system fully, because
they are very different and there is no 1:1 mapping between them.  So
while the *data* may be copied over, the permissions will likely only be
copied as far as how the linux filesystem layer sees them, and may not
be preserved 100%.

There are NTFS tools afaik though, (ntfsclone).  Since I don't actually
use NTFS for anything, someone else may better be able to assist.

Re: [gentoo-user] Upgrade query

[Florian Philipp]

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Am 21.07.2011 12:01, schrieb jdm@jdm.myzen.co.uk:
> A little advice please? I am about to build a new box going from athlon dual core to phenom six core. Including new sata drives and motherboard. I was going to clone all my partitions and the re emerged all packages with march native
> 
> Firstly would you reccommend cloning and if so what is best technology?
> 
> Second is a complete reinstall a better option or safer?

Cloning works fairly well. Especially for architectures that are so
close to each other as Athlon X2 and Phenom. I've done it for an upgrade
from one of the original Athlon 64 to a Phenom just a few months ago.
Just make sure your kernel contains all necessary drivers.

Also, udev will usually detect your network interfaces as new interfaces
and give them different numbers (eth1 instead of eth0 and so on).

Regards,
Florian Philipp


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Re: [gentoo-user] Upgrade query

[Joost Roeleveld]

On Thursday 21 July 2011 12:20:30 Florian Philipp wrote:
> Also, udev will usually detect your network interfaces as new interfaces
> and give them different numbers (eth1 instead of eth0 and so on).

You can "solve" this by deleting the respective entries in the udev config:

******
$ cat /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules                                                                                                                                                            
# This file was automatically generated by the /lib64/udev/write_net_rules                                                                                                                                             
# program run by the persistent-net-generator.rules rules file.                                                                                                                                                        
#                                                                                                                                                                                                                      
# You can modify it, as long as you keep each rule on a single line.                                                                                                                                                   
                                                                                                                                                                                                                       
# PCI device 0x1234:0x1234 (eth-device)                                                                                                                                                                                 
SUBSYSTEM=="net", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{address}=="00:11:22:33:44:55", 
KERNEL=="eth*", NAME="eth0"
*******

Removing this file or just the entries should force udev to reuse the network-
device-names.

-- 
Joost

Re: [gentoo-user] Upgrade query

[Alex Schuster]

jdm@jdm.myzen.co.uk writes:

> A little advice please? I am about to build a new box going from athlon
> dual core to phenom six core. Including new sata drives and motherboard.
> I was going to clone all my partitions and the re emerged all packages
> with march native
 
> Firstly would you reccommend cloning and if so what is best technology?

I'd plug the new system drive into the old PC and clone with dd. You can 
even make the partitions larger and use resize2fs (in case of ext3/4) to 
enlarge the space after cloning.

Once caveat: Your new SATA drives are probably using a block size of 4K 
instead of 512 bytes, internally. To the OS they still look like they have 
512 bytes. But when the partitions are not aligned to 4K boundaries (and I 
think this is still the case when using fdisk), there is a big performance 
loss. 

I also would make sure the whole drive is being written to once, in order to 
detect bad blocks. badblocks -sw <device> will do this.

> Second is a complete reinstall a better option or safer?

I'd say just clone it. Remove your /etc/udev/rules.d/*-persistent-*.rules 
files, so your network interfaces will not be renamed from eth0 to eth1.

If you change your CFLAGS, emerge -e world. I'm not sure if you better 
emerge -e system before (once or even twice) so the toolchain is already 
compiled with the new settings, maybe someone else will say something about 
this.

	Wonko

Re: [gentoo-user] Upgrade query

[Volker Armin Hemmann]

On Thursday 21 July 2011 10:01:10 jdm@jdm.myzen.co.uk wrote:
> A little advice please? I am about to build a new box going from athlon dual
> core to phenom six core. Including new sata drives and motherboard. I was
> going to clone all my partitions and the re emerged all packages with march
> native
 
> Firstly would you reccommend cloning and if so what is best technology?
> 
> Second is a complete reinstall a better option or safer?


are you using ACLs?

if not a good old cp -auv is sufficient. 

But.. why clone the system? This is a good chance to get rid of cruft and 
forgotten packages. A clean installation (and copied /etc) might not be a bad 
choice.

-- 
#163933

Re: [gentoo-user] Upgrade query

[john]

On Thu, 21 Jul 2011 20:01:31 +0200
Volker Armin Hemmann <volkerarmin@googlemail.com> wrote:

> On Thursday 21 July 2011 10:01:10 jdm@jdm.myzen.co.uk wrote:
> > A little advice please? I am about to build a new box going from
> > athlon dual core to phenom six core. Including new sata drives and
> > motherboard. I was going to clone all my partitions and the re
> > emerged all packages with march native
>  
> > Firstly would you reccommend cloning and if so what is best
> > technology?
> > 
> > Second is a complete reinstall a better option or safer?
> 
> 
> are you using ACLs?
> 
> if not a good old cp -auv is sufficient. 
> 
> But.. why clone the system? This is a good chance to get rid of cruft
> and forgotten packages. A clean installation (and copied /etc) might
> not be a bad choice.
> 

Thanks Gentoo.

A combination of a new install, rsyncing all personal data,
distfiles, /etc has worked wonders. Its nice to see that it is quicker
to install Gentoo and get it up and running pretty much as previously
than installing another well known operating system which took hours to
download updates and hours of searching the web for right drivers. And
this is totally free. LONG LIVE GENTOO