I’m moving across the country with my girlfriend so I’m going to have to do something about this site. Today we saw a major theme update, lots of css and maybe a little konami easter egg, but that doesn’t solve the problem of the fact that my server wont be plugged in for at least a week! Plus my girlfriend and I just started a new blog to document our move/future adventures, and I’ll need to keep that online during the move! Then of course the server is also hosting my ever important photography site. Initiate backup plan:
- Clone HDD
- Find new PC
- Setup new PC with cloned HDD
- Find someone to hold, power, and forward port 80 for one week
Well let me just say, I love Linux, Unix, whatever you want to call it. Non of this crappy driver BS we get stuck with using windows. My Ubuntu Server install probes the hardware at start up and loads the appropriate drivers. BOOM, whats up now! That makes cloning to other PC’s, or even just moving your HDD between hardware pretty simple. Obviously not everything is going to work, and in my case it was still pretty simple. The UUID of my SWAP got changed and my Ethernet adapter went from eth0 to eth1. Not too tough to figure out!
To clone my drive I used Gparted Live on USB. Its quite excellent and simple to use with a nice GUI. The command line is awesome, but often poking around with a mouse is more intuitive. The hardest part in this was the fact that the PSU in my server has only one SATA plug. I remedied that by cutting one off a blown PSU and jamming the wires into a free molex plug. HA, close enough.
Next I had to find a new PC and got a donor from my buddy JM. It’s an older HP with a Pentium 4 and 4 gigs of ram. Hell, that’s even better then what I’m running my server on now! Best of all, its SUPER quiet, so that’s a hit when you need to convince someone to keep a computer on 24/7.
Now I just have to head to my buddy Dru’s place to set up the server. He’s generously agreed to house the machine during my trip. Great!
