24 Jul
2019
24 Jul
'19
8:49 p.m.
BitFolk has the huge advantage that you can retain the
IP address of
the previous VPS. Where that's not the case, and you don't want to
update assorted stuff to point to the new one, an in-place upgrade is
possible, but it is a serious pain and you're looking at about well
over an hour of downtime.
I don't know whether this is useful info, but I recently decided to do
an in-place move of my VPS from Gentoo to Debian.
My approach was to install lxc (Linux containers) onto the Gentoo install.
Then I built a base Debian install and ran it in a container, but with
fill access to the host's network. I was then able to move, incrementally,
my services (apache, dovecot, etc) to run inside the container.
Once I was happy with that, it was just a matter of
booting to single user, moving the Gentoo root subdirectories into a new
/gentoo directory, moving the root fs from inside the LXC container up to
the top and setting up the fstab file and network configuration properly.
. So most of the work and testing was done incrementally over several
days and the only downtime was just the couple of minutes in single-user
mode.
If you're running a 64 bit kernel and 32 bit userland, I would imagine
that you can do something very similar to migrate from 32 to 64 bit
(i.e. debootstrap a 64 bit chroot, run it as an lxc container and
slowly migrate your services).
Then again, all that might just seem easy to me because I've been
working with lxc for more years than I care to think about!
Cheers,
Alun.