Moving FreeBSD to new PC?

[cwhitmore]

I'm currently running my site on an old Dell Dimension and would like to move all the programs, settings, etc. to another Dell PC.
Which imaging software is best for this? I've used Acronis on Windows images, but if you move the image onto dissimilar hardware it blows up. Does FreeBSD have the same problem? If not imaging, what is the best way to do this?

[graudeejs]

dump and restore

example on dump, can be found in my post here
http://daemonforums.org/showthread.php?t=1348
for restore you need some /tmp space (just saying for you to know, i was fucking for few hours, before i found out why, i can't restore my system)

[cajunman4life]

Last time I did such an animal, I used tar + gzip (really slow when you have 2G+ data on /usr), did a fresh install on the new system, then extracted all the .tgz archives, and a reboot. Done.

Dump is probably better though. I must have been drinking too much when I thought tar would be a good idea.

[cwhitmore]

Thanks or the information. If I use dump what is the best way to transfer those files over to the new PC? Should I setup NFS or FTP?

[Carpetsmoker]

Last time I did such an animal, I used tar + gzip (really slow when you have 2G+ data on /usr), did a fresh install on the new system, then extracted all the .tgz archives, and a reboot. Done.

While this works, please note that this will also copy all the hard links, such as /rescue, most stuff in there are hard links to /recue/rescue.
There are other hard links too, such as /bin/csh and /bin/tcsh.

If I use dump what is the best way to transfer those files over to the new PC? Should I setup NFS or FTP?

Either will work fine.

[graudeejs]

take a look at dump and restore man page, as i remember they have something mentioned about sending files over net....
take a look at man anyway.... it's pretty useful

[DrJ]

Originally Posted by cwhitmore

I'm currently running my site on an old Dell Dimension and would like to move all the programs, settings, etc. to another Dell PC.

Just plug the old disk into the new computer. Nothing else is required.

[TerryP]

Personally I think DrJs advice is best ;-)


And if you can't do that, you can always hook up the target machines drive to your current Dell, mount it and transfer data. Dump and restore makes life really easy, well worth learning them.


@killasmurf I knew I must've been nuts when I made /tmp only 512mb instead of my usual 15gb.....

[graudeejs]

Originally Posted by DrJ

Just plug the old disk into the new computer. Nothing else is required.

He will need do reconfigure custom kernel....

[graudeejs]

Originally Posted by TerryP

@killasmurf I knew I must've been nuts when I made /tmp only 512mb instead of my usual 15gb.....

15GB wooooh..... i have about 380+- MB for war, where tmp are



sorry for 2x posts

[DrJ]

Originally Posted by killasmurf

He will need do reconfigure custom kernel....

Depends. I have moved disks that had custom kernels between and they worked fine. As long as you have the appropriate device drivers it usually works fine. Of course they have to use the same basic architecture.

Rather than copy the disk itself, I would set up the new system, install FreeBSD and make sure that works. Then I'd copy over the config files, followed by use of rsync to move the rest of the stuff over. It works pretty well.

[phoenix]

You can always install GENERIC before pulling the drive.

[cwhitmore]

Okay, I got the dump command working and was able to backup /, /usr/ and /var individually on a USB flash drive. I mounted the USB on the new system, changed the directory so I was in / and then ran "restore rf /mnt/usb/backup", which ran fine. When I rebooted the new system it prompted me for the shell as if it couldn't find the hard drive. Does the backup of root also contain /dev info?

[graudeejs]

No dev is created no boot....

was that filesystem you run restore new? (newfs'ed?), it must be

also make sure you restored other backups on correct slices....

Also if you are running single user mode it will ask for shell

[TerryP]

I believe under FreeBSD that /dev should be managed by the kernel and devfs.

[cwhitmore]

Maybe it would be easier to explain what/why I'm backing up. I'm creating a secondary DNS for my remote offices. The ports that I've installed are perl5.8 and bind94. I can create a generic install of FreeBSD, but I want a quick and easy way to backup everything on the orginal system and restore it over. Can someone direct me on the restore syntax and KILLASMURF's suggestion of newfs?
thanks for all the help.

[graudeejs]

you need empty slice

newfs -U /dev/SLICE
mount /dev/slice /mnt
cd /mnt
restore -rf /backup/file
#or if you have compressed backup with bzip2
bzcat /backup/file.bz2 | restore -rf -

OK, i go to sleep, if anything, i will answer tomorrow

[cwhitmore]

Okay, I finally got everthing backed up on a usb drive. Now I'm trying to restore. If I restore over an existing FreeBSD install and reboot it asks me where the shell program exists. I tried downloading a live version of FreeBSD, but I can't get the CD to boot. How can I boot, mount the usb drive then restore without overwriting files that are open?

[TerryP]

I take you are getting the enter path to shell or press enter for /bin/sh kind of prompt ?


execute the shell and correct the problem, it should give you a clue on the messages from loader/kernel/init/rc during boot if anything is obviously wrong -- like fstab being fubar, etc


best I can think of with out more sleep...

[cwhitmore]

Yes, you're correct, it's asking for the path to shell. When I hit enter it doesn't give my a # prompt.
Looks like I need to restore the original fstab, but how can I do that if I can't get the shell to load?