New Computers

[Frank Cox]

Since my two main computers are about twelve years old I figured it's about time to replace them. (They still work, there's nothing wrong with them, but operating systems aren't getting any smaller and I've got the ram maxed out in both.)

After doing some looking around on ye olde Internet I ended up buying two Lenovo P3 workstations which were delivered yesterday.

I’ve spent most of the day setting them up and I’ll say that so far I’m very impressed with these machines.

The fan noise is pretty much nil. They’re even quieter than my existing computers and I always thought those were pretty quiet. You have to put your ear right by the case to hear the fans, otherwise you hardly even know it’s running.

I don't use Microsoft Windows so they can be ordered without that and you save $125 that way. These came with Ubuntu installed on them but I changed that to Rocky 9. The hardware appears to be 100% supported by EL9, so I’m doing a bit of speed learning on the differences between EL8 and EL9 since I’ve not used EL9 before. My existing computers are all on Rocky 8.

They’re even pretty. I never thought of computers in terms of appearance before but these cases were apparently designed by some kind of an industrial artist.

The CPUs are ISA level 3 so I should now be future-proofed in terms of running EL10 and beyond for at least a few years.

From ordering to "here's your boxes" took about a week and a half.

Bottom line: If any of you fine folks need a new workstation a Lenovo P3 is a pretty good bet.

[Carsten Kurz]

When you ordered these machines, did you investigate Linux compatibility specifically?

[Frank Cox]

I did indeed, since anything that didn't run Rocky Linux (RHEL knockoff) would be of no use to me.

Lenovo has a webpage listing their Linux compatible systems here:

https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/sol...rsonal-systems

I figured that if it's on the list I should be safe ordering it. And it turned out well.

If I need another computer for some reason I'll probably just order from them again. Beats getting something and playing a guessing game. If it doesn't run Linux it's of no value to me.

[Harold Hallikainen]

Frank, a question for you as a Linux expert. How are you going to transfer stuff from the old machine to the new ones? I've done it using G4L, where a drive image is transferred. I've got a VPS running Alma Linux, and I want to copy everything over to a new instance. In the past, I've done rsync of data and then a lot of reconfiguration. I'm wondering if I could rsync EVERYTHING from the existing instance to the new one except /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ (so the new instance maintains its new IP address).

Harold

[Randy Stankey]

I've never actually owned a Windows machine. I did have to use a Windows laptop for work when Cinemark issued me one. Because they used CC-Mail, at the time, I needed it to access my company e-mail. I suppose I could have gotten my own computer (iBook) to hack into CC-Mail but it would have been more trouble than it was worth. Just use the computer you've got. Right?

I got a few Windows machines from work at Mercyhurst when they offered buy-outs on leased machines. I got one for myself and one for my mother when she needed a new computer. Both of those were converted to Linux. They all just ran fine.

For copying files and data from hard drives, I use Carbon Copy Cloner for Mac and CloneZilla for LInux. Both can create bootable drives by making virtual clones of the original drive.

The computer guys at Mercyhurst used to spend a lot of time, running around, reinstalling Windows when people would mess things up until I recommended cloning of a generic installation onto a blank drive. Just set up a computer with an OS, just the way you want it then clone the drive onto a blank. Make a couple-three copies of that and keep the drives locked in your desk drawer or closet or some place safe. When you need it, just take out one of those drives and slap it into the computer you are working on and you're done! Since everybody who worked at Mercyhurst was supposed to have their home folder linked to the school's "X: drive" nobody should have to lose any of their data. IF they do, you can take the old drive back to your office, clone off the files and dump them on the person's X: drive where they should have been in the first place.a

I used to keep a live copy of Linux on a keychain drive, too. It used to really mess with people's minds when I changed their computer over to Linux! Then, reboot the computer and pull out the keychain to make their computer go back to normal. People always asked how I did that. I just told them, "It's complicated...nevermind..."

[Harold Hallikainen]

Very good1 For my desktop, I do an rsync backup to my virtual private server a few times a week. Once a month, I do a G4L "bare metal" backup to a USB drive. And then alwo once a month, all the files on my VPS are copied to Google Drive using gclone. Ideally, I will never lose data...

My question above has to do with migrating a VPS to another VPS. Because the new one will have a different partition size, I can't just do a drive image (which is hard to do on a VPS anyway), so I'm looking at just using rsync to copy every file from the existing VPS to the new one. But, to avoid messing up the IP address of the new one, I think I need to not copy over /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ . Otherwise, I THINK it would work. I guess I can try it and see what happens since the existing VPS continues to operate.

Harold

[Frank Cox]

In the case of these new computers, I was installing an updated operating system as well. This machine runs on EL9, my old machine was on EL8.

So I used an install image on a flash drive to do the initial installation, then I used a default desktop to install the rest of the software that I wanted. I used rsync to copy my home directory to a temporary directory on the new machine, then deleted the default home directory and renamed my temporary directory to my username.

Done. Set the IP addresses and hostnames to match the old machines, reload my crontabs and at jobs, and let 'er rip.

The rsync part took a fair while. I started setting these things up yesterday before lunch and really just finished removing the old machines and putting these into place an hour or so ago.

As a regular thing I have a cronjob that runs every night and backs up my data to a fileserver that lives in my basement. I find that if you have to do anything at all to make a backup it never happens, so this way I get a nightly backup without me having to take any action at all.

As for Harold's question, I've never tried rsync-ing an entire hard drive before but it can apparently be done:

https://ostechnix.com/backup-entire-...m-using-rsync/