Infra Clone

• domU on ofc
• a clone of james
• created to test the dist-upgrade of debian
• network interfaces:
  • eth1: 134.96.186.67
  • eth1:1: 134.96.186.152
• hostname: infra-clone

Status

Julius is currently down. We are of the opinion that maintaining julius is a lot of work for small benefits. Although it might prevent some migration problems you still need to clone the system before every upgrade (and while you're doing that making sure you don't break the network with two systems claiming to be the mailserver etc.). Also, the debian upgrades are normally pretty well tested.

I nevertheless decided to keep this documentation, so if a future administrator wants to revive julius he doesn't need to figure everything out anew. Note that I did not test these instructions, so I have no idea if they work or not.

Disks

• /dev/sda5 of james was cloned (using dd) and saved as sda5.img in /disk-images of ofc.

• later, /var of james also needed to be cloned, but it's partition size was > 100 GB.

• contents of /var from james was copied to ofc
• plan 1:
  • increase sda5.img (by appending bytes to the end, using dd)
  • plan 1.a:
    • make infra-clone a HVM so that it can be booted from a CD.
    • boot infra-clone using a knoppix live CD.
    • create a new partition in sda5.img, in the increased space
    • rsync contents of var/ into the new partition.
  • plan 1.b:
    • stick with the original config of infra-clone
    • tools like losetup, parted, resize2fs etc would be used for partition manipulation without booting infra-clone from live CD.
  • for various reasons, neither of plan 1.a and 1.b worked. Decided to drop plan 1.
• Plan 2:
  • created an 30GB image (using dd) called var.img
  • created an ext3 partition in var.img
  • copied the contents of var/ into var.img
  • mounted var/img as /var in infra-clone
  • this plan worked
• presently:
  • sda5.img is the / partition of infra-clone
  • var.img is the /var partition of infra-clone

Upgrades

• dist-upgrade of infra-clone is complete.
• infra-clone's Debian version is: 5.0.6 (Lenny)
• after upgrade, the following didn't work:
  • slapd
  • mysql-server
  • rkhunter
• mysql works after editing the "IP address to listen at" in its config file
• slapd also works now (starts), but its config options would have to be modified
• apache doesn't start now because of conflicts in SSL certs
  • solution: make apache load bare-bones setup? (ie a: "It World!" page only to start with).
• the bind config files in infra-clone and in james have been updated

  • <strike>infra-clone will serve DNS requests for ps1.uni-saarland.de and ps1.uni-saarland.de</strike>

  • <strike>also for gosa1.uni-saarland.de and gosa1.uni-saarland.de</strike>

  • <strike>will need to wait for sometime for the DNS to propagate.</strike>

  • realized that infra-clone wont be able to serve top level requests on domain.uni-saarland.de, have to make it serve a domain.ps.uni-saarland.de : Not done yet.

Testing

Suggestion: To bring james down for a couple of hours, so that there will be no IP/ports/SSL conflicts with infra-clone. Then, using the same IP, configs etc, start up infra-clone and see if all server processes start alright.

References (Incomplete)

• <Links to be added soon>

• IRC conversations
• Documentation

• Log of a creation session juliusSetupLog

New Infra Clone: Julius