daemon only version of current system

[fangorn]

Hi,

I have a delicate problem. I have to repartition and again setup the system harddisk of some workstations. But these workstations also are file servers for all the other workstations.

What I came up with as solution for minimum donwtime is I reformat a spare swap space on another harddisc to contain an intermediate gentoo system. I reboot the machine into this system, which does all the file server work while I resetup the main system harddisc.

My problem is, the root directory (without any data or /home directory) contains approx. 6 GB of data and the swap space is only 2 GB.

What directories do I need at minimum to have a running system that provides nfs, samba, apache, ftp? Besides that I will need fdisk, mkreiserfs, tar, gunzip, ... So i will need (as I am on amd64)
/etc
/bin
/lib(32/64)
/sbin
/var/www

and what else?

Thanks in advance for any help,
fangorn
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[Dan]

Add another hdd to the box that is large enough to hold your necessary data while you reinstall. Or add a new hdd to reinstall too without touching your current data until you reboot to the new hdd/install
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- Failure is not an option. It's bundled with your software.

[fangorn]

Would be nice, but to install the hdd I would have to reboot one time more often than I intend to.

As I said, downtime is of major essence here. As long as the workstation is down, 10 people sit around doing nothing but earning money.
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[Dan]

Don't be silly about a server in your office being down for 2 minutes. Which is how long it takes to shutdown,plug in a harddrive, and boot back up. You have wasted more company time than that , just thinking about what you are going to do to solve your issue.
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- Failure is not an option. It's bundled with your software.

[fangorn]

This applies to 10 boxes and for rebooting one of them the drives have to be unmounted, the machine has to be rebooted, the drives have to be mounted again. At last (forced) test this took over 15 minutes till everything worked again. I know. For a long time I stated we should have a SAN instead of this shared harddisk space. But all the time you hear "But it works for 20 years now". At least 2 reboots for 10 machines, plus on reboot to insert the spare disk ... you do the math.

I saw this as an interesting question. What is needed to get a basic system with just server daemons up and running. I just asked if somebody has tried this before, so I would not have to test it myself, not for somebody out there to fix my problem.
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