Debian – Resistance is Futile
Together with a few peeps (Marcus, Michael and Tim) I got us a
dedicated server. A little playground for all the geeky things
we are interested in. Once we got the root credentials the fun
part started.
It was a SuSE 9.0 system with a
single partition plus swap. (what a great disk layout
…tz) So the first task was to install
Debain onto that machine –
remotely! Unfortunately the hosting company wasn’t very
helpful at all. So we were on our own. Marcus and I took on the
challenge.
We turned off swap, formatted the swap partition and used it to
bootstrap the new Debian system. After the base system was
successfully installed in the former swap partition, we saved
some settings from /etc, then changerooted into the new system
and configured the base packages. After that we setup /dev and
the network interfaces. Of course we also had to install some
more packages – most important ssh. Once we configured
lilo we were ready for the first reboot. …booting a into
a Debian system we only expected to come up. After a
few minutes full of hoping ssh gave us a prompt *phew*!
Now since we had this tiny Debian system up and running inside
the swap partition we finally were able to repartition the disk.
We removed the one huge partition and setup LVM to manage our
partitions. Almost done. Once the all partitions were mounted
correctly we copied the running system across onto the new root
partition. Of course fstab and lilo had to be adjusted. Time for
the next critical reboot. Will the copied system come up just
like the system in the swap partition? The change from LVM1 to
LVM2 was also a critical factor
…but it did work out :-D I hope the move from the 2.4 to
the 2.6 kernel was the last reboot we had to do. It has always
felt like a bet against Murphy’s law.
Anyway… it was really great fun …and also amazing
to experience the strengths of
Debian. I never expected turning
a SuSE system into a Debian system would be such a piece of
cake. The debootstrap package is just great stuff! For more
details also have a look into
this excellent HOWTO.