An alternative to booting to external media, etc, would be a bind mount of / and /usr on separate temporary mount points, then dumping the data between them, leaving the existing system chugging along. A re-mount of the current /usr in -o ro mode might not be a terrible idea in that case. I had a good bit of luck going that route. A simple "cp -a" did the trick on the one system I've bothered with it on so far. I have a couple laptops that're rushing headlong into unsupported land right now though, so I'll be revisiting this soon enough.
As for specifics: # Make the temporary working areas mkdir /tmp/a; mkdir /tmp/b # Make sure nothing changes in /usr while the copy is done mount -o remount,ro /usr # Mount a mirror of the source and destination filesystems mount --bind /usr/ /tmp/a mount --bind / /tmp/b # And now, copy. cd /tmp/a cp -a ./ /tmp/b/usr/ The one big point of what not to do would be "mount --rbind". Very important (recursive bind would have the current /usr still visible in /tmp/b/usr/). After all that, comment out /usr in fstab and reboot. You *could* even just drop to a minimal runlevel that doesn't require /usr, unmount the old one and then jump back to your standard runlevel, but due to the reasons this is required now, I'm not entirely sure that option exists anymore (i.e. too much is dependent on /usr). That said, if you are booting to a LiveDVD -- On Mon, Dec 2, 2013 at 1:58 PM, Tanstaafl <tansta...@libertytrek.org> wrote: > On 2013-12-02 1:47 PM, Thanasis <thana...@asyr.hopto.org> wrote: >> >> on 12/02/2013 04:02 PM Tanstaafl wrote the following: >>> >>> >>> So, here's the plan, please check me... >>> >>> 1. Boot off of the latest gentoo LiveDVD >> >> >> If you boot a different system to do the rsync, or, if you do it over >> ssh, add the option --numeric-ids > > > Thanks, but no, like I said, I'll just boot that system to a LiveDVD and do > it from there... That actually does fall under "boot a different system" since the users won't line up between a LiveDVD and your actual system. -- Poison [BLX] Joshua M. Murphy
