[K12OSN] Upgrade FC1 and 2 to K12LTSP 4.4.1 Lessons Learned
Timothy Legge
tlegge at rogers.com
Fri Oct 21 00:18:52 UTC 2005
Hi All
I thought I would pass along the lessons learned from this past weekends
upgrade of two ltsp servers to the latest k12ltsp.
General Description:
This was a full install formatting all partitions except the home
partition, one server was backed up completely via amanda (more on that
later) the other simply had etc, var, tftpboot and root tarred and
zipped and copied to the home partition (actually done on both)
My basic procedure:
Create Backup Directory on home
Backup lts.conf
Backup etc directory
Backup root directory
Backup tftpboot directory
Cleanup var directory
Backup the var directory:
Print df -h output
Print fdisk output
Install defaults, manual disk partition, format all partions except /home
Copy paste normal users back to passwd and shadow
Copy and paste required customizations to lts.conf, dhcpd.conf, hosts
Restore special sis.zrom to /tftpboot
General Result
In general it was a smashing success. Within an hour you could login to
each server with the user id from a terminal
Leasons Learned
1) Windows is a pain. I spent significant time trying to figure out why
samba as a domain controller on one of the servers was not working
correctly with a Windows 2000 server. The windows server would not
allow my users to login to w2k with the samba domain user and password.
Apparently windows uses some id for the domain that is only accessible
by exporting it with a samba tool and restoring it to the new server.
Yes, that is obvious in hindsight and removing and re-adding the win2k
server to the domain fixed it.
2) selinux is a pain. I spent significant time trying to figure out why
samba as a domain controller on one of the servers was not working
correctly with a Windows 2000 server. The windows box could see the
shares but could not figure out the network they were on. Google point
me to disabling selinux for all samba uses.
3) Windows is a pain II. After the users could connect, they could not
save settings (like mapped shares). Again significant time was lost
until I decided to delete the users profile from the win2k server and
the profiles share on the samba box.
4) Evolution is a pain. If you are going to change the location/format
of folder and configuration in 2.0 of your product the following rules
should apply.
1) Always offer (no force) a backup of the current setup.
2) Do not ever fail part way through
3) If you do fail part way through offer a link to a manual fool proof
method
4) If you do fail, fail gracefully and provide debugging information
for what went wrong (3 out 7 failures is not a good record)
5) Evolution is a pain II. Just because you are trying to replicate the
functions of MS Outlook don't be stupid about it. Account setting for
an email program belong with the email program not in some registry like
gconf file god knows where that gets overwritten if you do something
like reset-default-desktop.
6) Amanda tape backups are great as long as you have a copy of all files
in /var/lib/amanda. Your copy of these files must be made after the
final backup or the individual files on the tape are not retrievable
(yes a amrestore will work but you need the log files and index files
for the final backup to use amrestore to retrieve files from that tape).
7) (as above) reset-default-desktop removes evolution email account settings
So overall the upgrade went well. Most everything seems to work well
(except sound and local usb storage but I haven't spent much tim on it
yet...)
Tim
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