I've done a few of them so far. Redking is now running on a shiny new mobo/proc combo, has 2 GB of ram, and much more drive space for the home & web directories. Also, I got a DVI video card so I can use my KVM to look at the server. Before this, I only had text access.
For all my bitching on this blog, things are definitely getting easier. This move was pretty much a drop in, even though I screwed up on the hardware order. I didn't notice that the new mobo had only 1 IDE controller, and redking had 3 IDE drives (not counting the DVD drive). So, I had to get a SATA drive and move some things over. I'll eventually have to move one more drive over to SATA so I can use the DVD drive for upgrades, but that's done later.
Even having to move the drives and install a new OS on the SATA drive, it was pretty easy. I've got my process streamlined with backups of essential files. I just drop what I need in the right places and away I go.
I've still got some more security twiddling to do. I've discovered some other security software I'm playing with, and I'm going to move a few more things over.
All in all, my backups performed well, moving the drives was easy, and I'm very happy with the switch.
I find that most of my problems figuring out how to do something:
1) How to properly classify the problem
2) Where to find the information once it's classified
For example, I have 2 machines that I run. One is this server and one is my desktop box. Both run Linux. Now, I've had some circuit breaker issues for reasons that I haven't been able to figure out. When the power goes out, both machines go down unceremoniously. I'm convinced that this has been the cause of quite a few of my HD failures in the past few years. Anyway, the other bad part is that neither of them have any "remember your power state" settings in the BIOS. So, when I'm away, if the power goes off, the machine(s) stay off until I can return and turn them off. This isn't a big deal for my desktop machine, but for my server it's really annoying.
I'm building a new server, and that mobo's BIOS doesn't even have that nice "power on A/C loss" setting. What it does have is a bazillion ways to power it back on: USB, network, etc. What I'm trying to do now is get an advance UPS so that it will stay on in case the power is just a flicker. If it's not, it'll take a command to shut down.
What would you call that? UPS command? Power management? Auto-shutdown? I don't even begin to know where to start googling.
To point 2, once you've even got the terms, sometimes it's hard to know where to search for it. You have to scope the problem. Is it a kernel issue? A distro issue? A software issue? How much of the software is a distro-specific thing?
Sometimes the possibilities are truly staggering. What I'm therefore going to try and do is be a Linux doc link site. There have been FAQ's on various forums, but I'd like to join them all together. Sometimes, the Gentoo people have something figured out that the Fedora people might like to know. My plan is to have more links on the left to help out.