SuSE Enterprise Linux 9 file server migration to OpenSuSE 11

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Submitted by admin on Sat, 01/03/2009 - 08:14

OpenSuSE 11 One of my clients has a production SuSE Enterprise Server 9 file server in place and their previous network administrator was a little power trippy so nothing was documented and shortcuts were taken to make things work.

This server is a fairly basic configuration the primary use of the server is to serve files of a samba share and to provide network printing capabilities.

After the restore of all the data the server was unable to boot properly, thus they gave me a call early morning today which is all fine and dandy. So we did some basic troubleshooting and I made the following conclusions:

Upgrade the current OS (SELS 9) to the current OpenSuSE 11 revision
Confirm Data Integrity of the production user shares
Configure Samba as it was previously setup -- Confirm the workings
Configure CUPS as it was previously setup -- Confirm the workings
Install and Configure SNMP (They previously were not doing any performance monitoring so there was no indication of any resource utilization)
Reconfigure NovaNET 11 backups to tape in effort to ensure proper RTO and minimal RPO

So far we're at the point of pulling down the OpenSuSE 11 dvd.... 3 hours into the migration :) I will post as progress is made.. fun times

So after 5 hours of work the motherboard that the server had in it (Supermico - X6DVA-EG) the BIOS had a revision the never updated and for whatever reason OpenSuSE did care for it too much. I know the if we would had upgraded the BIOS to the current version everything would had been fine, but my client wasn't confident in this resolution as he's had issues with BIOS updates in the past. So the eventual decision was to roll back to SELS 9 and rebuild the samba configuration manually (which I don't really see a big issue in other than they are running on some old ass kernel)

So the process that was gone through to update the OS was really straight forward and just boot from the DVD and Select the Installation option > Select Upgrade > step through the prompts make sure everything is alright then go through with it, and wait for the progress to go through. Reboot the system login as root and make sure that all the services are enabled that you want. Change the package repos to the internet based repos, run and update on the installed packages. Reboot the server and poof -- back in business :)