Server Swap Tomorrow

Tomorrow is the big day. The system that’s been sitting (hulking is more like it) on my desk beside me, towering to the roof, the system that has had it’s drives bashed and broken and plundered, whose newly installed OS has been tested, retested, and then tested some more, will find out if it makes the cut. Tomorrow it will be swapped in as ufies.org and hopefully all will go well.

If errors start popping up in a day or week, and if they’re hardware related, I will simply unplug it, get a @hotmail address, find a job where I can die a ripe old age without ever seeing a computer again, and be happy about it.

So a note to all those who read this who are hosted on the box, do your backups, just in case, m’kay? The data won’t be copied, moved or manipulated, but better safe than sorry.

The only thing I’m worried about is the order that Linux brings up it’s raid arrays. The current system has three RAID arrays, md0, md1, and md2. The new UFies.org set up has three raid arrays, all named the same. Hopefully the kernel will bring them up in the right order, that is, the order I want them to come up in. There’s really no good information that I could find out there on this 🙁

The kernel is told to load /dev/md0 as the root drive, and if it can find the right “md0”, the rest doesn’t matter. The system can run without /var or /home until I can come in and rename thing. However, if it loads up the old md0, I’ll have to get Fred and Cat5 to play with GRUB boot commands until they can find the right one. Again, not a huge deal, but a potential PITA. Of course, after they find it and boot up on it I have to make sure that it stays there properly. I’ll make sure I pass along a LiveCD for them just in case they need to fix things on the fly.

So yea, tomorrow, late afternoon, between 3:30-5:30 or so is when it’ll go down, when it comes back up no on knows, but if you can’t log in don’t worry about it too much, just try again in a bit.