migrating from RedHat (RHEL 4)

Message

morphal · Post by **morphal** » Mon Oct 30, 2006 11:03 pm

First off: This may not officially count as an install question. If it doesn't, I apologize. I wont get cranky if it gets relocated.

I'm a new system admin for a company of about 50-75 people across four cities. We have a mail server that was pieced together by my predecessor and it's running on RHEL4. The support is about to expire on it and I really think a two-day response time for paid support is ridiculous. I'd prefer to get away from their distribution.

I've run several other small-time servers but nothing a company ever depended on or that really affected anyone beside myself if there was down time.

I want to migrate the server to Gentoo but I'm not sure how to do so without losing user mail and perhaps some of the fancy admin tools they have: Webmin, some special Postfix rules, etc. I also want to make sure that never during the migration does someone outside the company attempt to send us an email that gets bounced because the mail server was down. It's a lot easier to send an email to my coworkers saying "Hey, I'm going to be fixing stuff so if you can't check your mail, don't spaz." than it is to say "Yes, I'm sorry about the bounced email. Please, don't go to our competitors because we failed to respond to something urgent."

I'm pretty sure I can pull of an install inside RedHat in a chrooted environment but I want to make sure I can migrate all the data as needed. So, before I even start the Gentoo install, I need to know if there's anything special that has to be done.

For the record: Someone should really start looking at some kind of more formal support for Gentoo. As the distribution becomes better and better, it's going to get used in more and more situations where paid support becomes worthwhile.

sazioh · Post by **sazioh** » Tue Oct 31, 2006 1:26 am

You definitely need to do that on a test system, test it for a few weeks and then do it for real. But really, with 75 users, what really is the price of renewing the support of a single redhat system. Do yourself a favor, renew your support and save yourself hours and hours of work/testing/downtime/user complains. It only a mail server you are running, so who cares really what distro it's running? Support is cheaper than your time. Yes, Redhat is inferior, but it's still good enough to run postfix...

My 2 cent.

S-

morphal · Post by **morphal** » Tue Oct 31, 2006 7:06 pm

It's not a matter of the actual cost. It's a two-day response time to support requests and I can only submit requests via their online form. That's asinine. I'll pay for support if I'm actually going to get it. If something does hit the fan, I can get help in two days from anywhere, why would I pay them for such terrible service?

For what it's worth, it's also an Apache server and I'm much more comfortable with Apache on Gentoo. Admittedly, they're very similar though. The mail system itself needs a massive overhaul and handling that switch is one of the reasons I want to move to Gentoo. Before I had decided to re-purpose the existing system and ditch Red Hat, I was just looking for a way to migrate to a new machine/mail system and leave the current one intact. My last post about that is here. If keeping them completely separate really is a better idea during the migration, fine. I'll go back to that thread and mark this one abandoned.

nixnut · Post by **nixnut** » Tue Oct 31, 2006 7:25 pm

Moved from Installing Gentoo to Gentoo Chat.
Better off in here imho

morphal · Post by **morphal** » Tue Oct 31, 2006 7:28 pm

How very disappointing because we got off-topic.

Basically, Red Hat support is awful unless you pay through the nose. I want away from them not because we can't afford it but because they wont earn it.

Can offer some advice on the actual question?

vibrokatana · Post by **vibrokatana** » Tue Oct 31, 2006 9:12 pm

Best bet is to setup a similar system with gentoo and get used to it. I would actually recommend fedora core or centos for a person not familiar with running a gentoo box. Dont wipe the old box until you have all of the config files and everything copied over. It would be preferrable if you had another system setup to take over the mail duties while you migrate (the lovely test bed works

).

PaveQ · Post by **PaveQ** » Tue Oct 31, 2006 9:41 pm

Why do you want to do reliable mailserver with gentoo instead with debian, for example? Gentoo is constantly changing so it would be ideal for some dev-server where you need latest php example. But for mailserver?

morphal · Post by **morphal** » Tue Oct 31, 2006 10:55 pm

I know how to update only the security holes. You don't have to blindly emerge -u every time you sync.

However, our systems are all rack-mounted so it's not like I can just grab any ol' machine and throw it in there. Mind you, I'd like to, but ...

vibrokatana · Post by **vibrokatana** » Wed Nov 01, 2006 7:29 am

All you have to do is configure a system with an identicle setup and migrate to that system just before taking the main system offline.

With the proper usage the users probably wouldnt even notice that you dropped the mail server.

trossachs · Post by **trossachs** » Tue Nov 14, 2006 7:37 pm

Curious. What client do your users currently use for mail access?