Move a mail server

[Bliss, Aaron]

Lisa,
It's definitely possible that the you just need to update your grub.conf
file and point it to /, as the new box (depending upon it's
configuration) maybe identifying the hard drive differently than the old
box...you can fix this by booting the new box from an install disk into
rescue mode...

Aaron 

-----Original Message-----
From: redhat-list-bounces at redhat.com
[mailto:redhat-list-bounces at redhat.com] On Behalf Of Lisa Casey
Sent: Wednesday, June 20, 2007 1:53 PM
To: redhat-list at redhat.com
Subject: Move a mail server

Hi,

I have a sendmail server running on Redhat Linux 7.2. The load average
on this machine occasionally goes quite high, and once before I was
advised that the server needed more memory. The motherboard in this
computer will not support more than around 750 MEG RAM. 

We purchased a "barebones" system: case, motherboard, cpu, fan & power
supply in which we can put 2 GB of memory. My original idea was to just
move the hard drive from the old computer to the new. We did this once
before successfully when a motherboard crashed. Unfortunately, this time
it didn't  work. When I try to  boot the drive in the new system, I get
the following message during the boot process:

Kernel panic: No init found. Try passing init=option  to kernel

I've done some googling and here's what I THINK the problem is (feel
free to let me know if you think I'm way off base here). I think that
the kernel on the radhat drive cannot support the new hardware and  I
need to upgrade the kernel. I've never upgraded a kernel on Redhat
before.

I found a procedure for upgrading the kernel here:
http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-7.2-Manual/custom-guide/ker
nel.html

I'm not 100% certain what kernel is currently in this machine (I didn't
set it up originally). uname -r says 2.4.9-31custom  but in /boot I have
a initrd-2.4.7-10.img (so I don't know if the kernel is 2.4.9 or 2.4.7).
I also can't figure out where to get a new kernel. I checked the errata
for redhat 7.2 on the redhat  site and found several but  every one of
them says "File Missing" and there's nothing to click on to download it.
Can anyone help me out with this? Considering I'm a novice at kernel
upgrading, how likely  might I be to render my system unbootable? That
would be a disaster as this is currently our only mail server.

Another thought I had to solve this problem is this. Perhaps I should
just install a new hard drive in the new system, install linux on it,
then move the user accounts and mailboxes over to the new drive. Does
anyone know of a good "how to" for moving from one Sendmail server to
another?

Anyone have any thoughts as to which of these two procedures might be
best to  solve my problem?

Thanks,

Lisa Casey
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