Setting up new server checklist

Don’t mind me, I’m just recording what I’ve done so far in setting up my new box.

• Ordered new server
• Ordered new rails for server
• Ordered two 1Tb drives for server
• Installed drives in server
• Discovered rails were the wrong kind for this server
• Grovelled around the net and found the right type of rails, ordered them.
• Installed Debian on the server.
• Tried just blasting the entire backup of the old server onto the new one was a disaster, went to Plan B.
• Discovered that i386 Debian works fine, except neither the Xen nor the Bigmem kernels boot.
• Downloaded and tried to install ia64 Debian, only to discover that’s the one for Itanic.
• Downloaded and installed amd64 Debian. Xen kernel working fine.
• Installed and configured munin. Discovered smartd doesn’t work because I’m using an Adaptec RAID controller. Tried to install dpt-i20-raidutils, but they don’t seem to work either. Copied some third party munin Xen nodes from old box backup.
• Installed sshd. Copied “authorized_hosts” from old backup, configured it to only allow public key authentication.
• Configured the dom0 to take less memory. 96M was plenty on the old box, but this one didn’t boot until I increased it to 128M.
• Make lvm disks for the domUs.
• Copied one of the backups. Had to change the sxp file to specify the amd64 kernel, and copy the /lib/modules/*-xen-amd64 to the disk space. It boots, but for some reason it won’t start up the network.
• Copied another backup. This time it booted the amd64 kernel just fine, but got a lot of errors on start up. But it did connect to the internet and stuff, so I’m not sure how critical the things that didn’t start up were. May have to try installing an i686 kernel and booting the xen instances with that.
• The box rebooted spontaneously while trying to copy a lot of files over at once. Will have to try again without the memory restrictions (and maybe with the non-xen kernel). Will also have to make sure that it doesn’t do anything bad if one of the domUs is doing heavy i/o.
• Tried again copying everything over with the non-xen kernel with 4Gb, and it still died.
• Tried to disable RAID controller, didn’t work. So made 4 separate 1-disk “Volumes”, and go back to install Debian amd64 again.
• Configured with /dev/sda with 2Gb /boot, 1Gb swap, rest available. /dev/sdb with 2Gb /, 1Gb swap, and rest available. Made “available” parts of two disks into an MD0 software RAID 1, then made that into a PV for LVM.
• Overnight untarring of backups of mp3s and xen1 didn’t crash it. Woo hoo!
• Installed sshd, copied config from old dom0, tested sshing in with a public key.
• Installed xen stuff, and munin-node.
• Untarred backups of xen2-3.

Next steps:

• Copy the backups verbatim onto those disks, and hope like hell that Xen can boot them.