Moving Aurora to DL585

I have started with Aurora when I first joined the Regenstrief Institute in 1998. It was then my main workstation running FreeBSD 4.3. Since then I have upgraded machines 3 times each time switching to a piece of surplus hardware. Aurora runs 24/7 handles DNS, email, miscellaneous websites and open source project collaborations, CVS, now subversion, and Trac. It is also hosting the Regenstrief consolidated source code repository. I have a new machine for that, DL585 4 x 2.4 GHz AMD64 (Opteron) attached to an HP SAN. I have 3 other machines of the same type and configuration. Those other machines currently run Solaris 10 but I am considering moving back to FreeBSD where I can. It is much easier to manage.

This page is just my notebook documenting my steps at configuration and migration.

Basic OS Setup

There is a problem with DL585 and FreeBSD-6.x regarding ACPI, which seems necessary for SMP. I had solved this problem a year ago, but cannot remember how I did it. I wish I had taken notes like this. There was something about BIOS firmware upgrade and some advanced configuration option. I did that on the Aishwariya machine and it worked, and so my next step will be to swap out the disks and try on that machine. If it works I'll try to find out why and copy. But if I can't find out I'll just move on with the hardware switched.

OS Configuration

In the past I simply made a copy of /etc into /etc.old and went through by date to look for modifications that I might have made. This process is not very efficient. I wish I had tracked my changes.

Users

/etc/passwd and /etc/master.passwd etc/group etc. can be copied as is. And so can the users home directories.

General Configuration

syslog.conf inetd.conf

/etc/namedb - for DNS /etc/mail - for mail and lists and aliases etc.

Installed Software

Since AMD64 should be backwards compatible I should be able to copy /usr/local as a whole, and also copy /var/db/pkg (and other package installation related things.)

The /data and /usr1 directories

I have moved to have only few large partitions rather than the traditional multiple smaller Unix partitions. I only have / and /data. The / file system contains root and /usr, the whole OS installation. It also contains /usr/local. But most actual data is moved to /data. That includes web content, Trac sites, subversion. The latter 2 were previously on /usr1 because of historical reasons. /usr1 will move to the SAN.