Future server upgrade - have I understood/planned everything correctly?

[jonitfcfan]

As per title I'm slowly getting new parts to build a new server to replace my existing server. Nothing wrong with the current one, I just feel like changing it over (I'll repurpose the current one once I get the new machine going, I have some stuff in mind for it). I'm not planning on taking any hardware from the existing server to put into the new one, except the USB drive onto which unRAID is installed.

 

As I understand it the licence is attached to the USB drive rather than the server hardware, so my plan is the following:

 

• Stop my Docker containers
• Sync any changes to files/appdata onto my external USB drive via web UI terminal
• Shutdown current server
• Remove unRAID USB from current server
• Insert unRAID USB into new server
• Boot up new server, check main unRAID settings have carried over (change if needed)
• Format/configure new drives accordingly
• Copy data from external drive to new drives
• Reinstall & start my missing plugins/Docker containers
• Check plugin/Docker container settings have been carried over (side thought: where are plugin settings stored?)
• Profit(??)

 

Am I doing this right?

[jonitfcfan]

bump

[Frank1940]

I don't see any mention of VM's so I would assume that you don't have any.

 

Unraid is generally very hardware agnostic if you are not using VM's.   The exception being if you are using more than one NIC.  In that case, you might have to make some changes to the network configuration. 

 

One more concern could concern BIOS vs UEFI booting.  Some modern boards default to UEFI while some very old boards have only BIOS booting.  You can tell by looking the EFI folder on the boot drive.  If it is named EFI, the boot process will use UEFI.  If named EFI-, it will use BIOS.  A simple rename of this directory/folder will change which boot process is used.  Often, you can select which boot option is used by a setting in the Motherboard's BIOS.

 

By the way, You can just shutdown the present server. Pull the flash/boot drive.  Plug it in the new computer and boot it up.  Have a look to see if you have any problems booting up to a login prompt.  Then see if you can access the GUI.  Look at the various setup screens and see if anything looks awry.  Don't make any changes to the setup until you are sure everything looks like it will work.  (Don't worry about Dockers at this point...)   IF something is awry (which I would doubt), post back with what you see.   Doing it this way would allow you to shutdown the new server, swap the flash drive back to the old server, and it should reboot normally. 

 

You can also setup a Trial License boot drive and use that in your new server to see what changes might be required.

 

I have made major hardware upgrades to both of my servers over the years and never had a configuration problem with any of the upgrades.  Once the hardware was working properly, the server restarted with the Unraid boot drive, the server was up and running in two minutes after power turn on.  (Of course, I did move the data drives into the new hardware setup so I did not have the data copying delay.)  

[jonitfcfan]

Thanks for replying...

 

40 minutes ago, Frank1940 said:

I don't see any mention of VM's so I would assume that you don't have any.

Correct

 

40 minutes ago, Frank1940 said:

Unraid is generally very hardware agnostic if you are not using VM's.   The exception being if you are using more than one NIC.  In that case, you might have to make some changes to the network configuration.

I only use one NIC

 

41 minutes ago, Frank1940 said:

One more concern could concern BIOS vs UEFI booting.  Some modern boards default to UEFI while some very old boards have only BIOS booting.  You can tell by looking the EFI folder on the boot drive.  If it is named EFI, the boot process will use UEFI.  If named EFI-, it will use BIOS.  A simple rename of this directory/folder will change which boot process is used.  Often, you can select which boot option is used by a setting in the Motherboard's BIOS.

My current server boots via UEFI and my new one should too, but that folder name change trick is useful to know

 

42 minutes ago, Frank1940 said:

By the way, You can just shutdown the present server. Pull the flash/boot drive.  Plug it in the new computer and boot it up.  Have a look to see if you have any problems booting up to a login prompt.  Then see if you can access the GUI.  Look at the various setup screens and see if anything looks awry.  Don't make any changes to the setup until you are sure everything looks like it will work.  (Don't worry about Dockers at this point...)   IF something is awry (which I would doubt), post back with what you see.   Doing it this way would allow you to shutdown the new server, swap the flash drive back to the old server, and it should reboot normally.

I'll give this a try once I get all the parts together for the new server (still waiting for a few parts to arrive at the time of writing)

[jonitfcfan]

OK I've got everything mostly working, but I can't get Nextcloud going. For some reason, after reinstalling from previous apps with all the same settings as before, I get an 'internal server error' message when I browse to the login page. I copied all the appdata over from the old server beforehand but it doesn't seem to be working.

 

So far everything else seems to be working, just need to finish copying over the rest of my data.

[Frank1940]

4 minutes ago, jonitfcfan said:

but I can't get Nextcloud going. For some reason, after reinstalling from previous apps with all the same settings as before, I get an 'internal server error' message when I browse to the login page. I

Go to the support forum for Nextcloud and look/ask for a solution there.  (You can find the Support forum by looking for it on the APPS tab in the GUI)