On Mon, Mar 1, 2010 at 5:27 PM, Slack-Moehrle mailinglists@mailnewsrss.com wrote:

Hi All,

I have a server that is running nicely, except I have hit the maximum RAM (4gb) and I wish to add more.

It is an ASUS board, AMD X64 dual core, nvidia nic.

What I want going to move to is a dell board, Intel Pentium M dual code, which supports 8gb of RAM.

Can I just unplug the HD and move it to the new server and boot it up?

I assume that the NIC will need to be re-setup, but what other issues would there be?

I am not running X at all. Doing apache, zimbra, mysql.

It usually works for me without much fuss. If you'd like to be certain you can try doing a test installation on the new server. Once installed, take a peek at the kernel parameters. If you see anything markedly different, just add a stanza to the old system with the parameters from the test installation before shutting it down.

You may also want to peek at any kernel modules that you load for things like CPU scaling or other machine specific features.

Slack-Moehrle wrote:

Hi All,

I have a server that is running nicely, except I have hit the maximum RAM (4gb) and I wish to add more.

It is an ASUS board, AMD X64 dual core, nvidia nic.

What I want going to move to is a dell board, Intel Pentium M dual code, which supports 8gb of RAM.

Pentium-M was a single core laptop chip about 4 years ago, that predated the Core family of CPUs... The current "Pentium" dual core chips are low end Celeron-style chips based on Core2Duo chips with smaller caches and disabled features..

Some potential places you get into trouble moving linux...

1) old architecture was x86_64, new CPU isn't.

2) old board and new board require different device names for the disk systems, so /etc/fstab has to be editted

3) new board requires different IO drivers in /boot/initrd-*.img

On Mon, Mar 1, 2010 at 5:27 PM, Slack-Moehrle mailinglists@mailnewsrss.com wrote:

Hi All,

I have a server that is running nicely, except I have hit the maximum RAM (4gb) and I wish to add more.

It is an ASUS board, AMD X64 dual core, nvidia nic.

What I want going to move to is a dell board, Intel Pentium M dual code, which supports 8gb of RAM.

Can I just unplug the HD and move it to the new server and boot it up?

I assume that the NIC will need to be re-setup, but what other issues would there be?

I am not running X at all. Doing apache, zimbra, mysql.

If you're worried, use a tool such as g4l to make an exact duplicate of your system. You boot with the G4L disk then clone the HD to an external HD or a network accessible share. Then boot the new with the G4L disk then reimage the drive from the backup.

The ease with which this is done is all relative. Unlike MS Windows, which can have lots of problems when moving to a new system, Linux installations generally move quite easily. In fact, the initrd on CentOS contains many generic modules so at worst case it can often fall back to a compatible module. To inspect the initrd you can copy the existing initrd.img to file such as foo.img.gz, gunzip, then use cpio to extract the foo.img file. Once you do that you will see the many modules that exist.

Going from ATA to SCSI or SATA will have some issues, generally with fstab but that's to be expected. Other than that, no real problems.

BTW, prior to reading your email I'd posted another message about moving Xen systems from one system to another. The Xen infrastructure can hide a lot of the system specific internals so you may consider virtualizing if you think this may be a regular occurence.