My first question is can I simply plug this drive into the new faster
motherboard and have it just boot up and run?
Depends on your power supply. You will need a EPS12V power supply and
you will want to get a good one that provides clean power signals if you
want stability.
Next, should I get a dual core CPU or just a fast single core? Most
of the load on this server is due to Spamassassin dealing with about
2000 email accounts. Although it also serves up websites that is
pretty minor load I beleive since they do not get all that many hits.
Get a dual core cpu with 1MB of cache. spamassassin is not a single
threaded process so a fast single core will not benefit it. How do you
run spamassassin?
I was told up2date will update this server too 4.4. Problem is that
the Directadmin GUI is a bit touchy. Any modifications to the
services its married to could be bad. I really need to talk to there
tech support on this.
My new server motherboard is socket 939 and supports DDR 400. It was
a bargin off ebay but appears to work fine. Would I be better off
getting a socket AM2 that supports DDR2 or will that make much
difference in performance? The 939 motherboard supports a max of
4Gbyte DDR too.
DDR2 does not give any notable increase in performance. In fact, it adds
latency which is why it took some time for AM2 to come out. You will
probably be much more happy with a DDR RAM system.
I also purchased a Seagate SATA 500Gbyte drive. The 300G PATA drive
is just under half full. I imagine mostly email. Mailboxes for the
most part have 50M cap but there alot of them and still adding more.
Is there anyway to copy the OS installed on the PATA to a larger and
faster SATA drive? I am doubting this since the drives place/mnt in
/dev will change.
You plan to run this on a single drive? I guess you don't have any
problems with downtime. A SATA drive will appear as /dev/sdx while the
PATA drive will appear as /dev/hdx. I don't think you will have any
problems with drive order/device names.
I know the best solution is to install CentOS 4.4 on new box, install
Directadmin, and then backup and restore to new server but that will
result in substantial downtime that I am trying to get out off. Plus
a lot of work. The Directadmin install has been heavilly customized
and I will need to remember what I all did to it. Actually I may
still do that but I would like to move to a faster motherboard first
so just maybe the backups run faster.
If downtime is important to you, consider adding an extra drive and
running software raid mirrors at the very least for the future. You will
get downtime no matter what if you are not going to do a live transfer
of data from the old box to the new one. You might as well do a good one
like perhaps getting yourself a mirrored drive to install on.
If not, you should be able to create identically sized partitions on the
SATA drive and use dd to transfer your filesystems across and attempt to
boot up with the SATA drive.
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