Swapping Motherboards?

[Rick Stevens]

Harold Hallikainen wrote:
> In anticipation of my server eventually dying, I'm trying to come up with
> a way to have almost zero down time. The machine has two removable drives.
> One holds /home . The other holds everything else. I'm thinking of using
> Norton Ghost to duplicate these drives. Then, should I lose a drive, I
> just plug in my backup.
> 
> The next trick is, if I lose the motherboard or power supply, I move the
> drives from the dead machine to a live machine. The motherboard in the
> existing server is no longer in production and getting expensive (Tyan
> Tiger 200). How much trouble am I likely to have if the motherboard is not
> an exact duplicate of the one I'm running now when I move drives?

We do that a lot.  The primary issues are:

1. SCSI drives:  Make sure the mobos use the SAME SCSI chipset.  If they
don't, you'll have to boot the new mobo in rescue mode, change the
/etc/modprobe.conf (or /etc/modules.conf for 2.4 kernels) to reflect the
new mobo's SCSI controller, then rebuild the initrd image to use the new
SCSI driver, and if using lilo, rerunning lilo.  This is not an issue
with IDE drives.

2. Network card drivers.  Similar to the SCSI issue above, you will have
to modify modules.conf or modprobe.conf to reflect the new network
cards.

3. Video drivers.  You may have to modify your X config file (or run
redhat/system-config-display) to reflect a different video card.

4. Memory: As far as memory and such, unless you make a massive change
(e.g. go from 2GB to 32GB), don't worry about it.  Linux will resize.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-     There are only 10 kinds of people in the world -- those who    -
-                 understand binary and those who don't              -
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