Bill wrote: > I found one of my firewalls has a 4Gig drive. While it is still > working fine, I am thinking maybe I should remove the 10 year old thing > and maybe move it somewhere a little less stressed). > > I googled and faq'd and nothing recent came up, so I was wondering if > this was the best way to move the stuff over. > > * Put in the new drive > * Boot with cd / floppy > * Partition new drive with the same layout, but bigger partitions
Only do this if you really need it. Leaving much of your disk unallocated has lots of advantages. 4G is a lot for a firewall...look at all the people putting firewalls on 256M and 512M flash media. If you don't have something to put in them, making partitions bigger just makes it take longer to reboot after you trip over the power cord. If you leave a Big Empty at the end of the disk, you can always create a new partition there if something actually gets filled. There's just no reason to allocate every block of a 40G (or 80G, or 160G) disk to a partition in a firewall... Stick your Most Likely to Grow partition at the end of the disk, you can then use growfs to enlarge it, rather than copying the data. > * For each, mount old and new and dump from one to the other (per faq) > * Recreate devices > * Remove old drive reboot > > Does this seem sane? +reinstall boot blocks. Just did this today on a system, myself. Saw your note, read it, and thought, "...and install boot block". Saw the reply reminding you to reinstall boot block. Did my upgrade, thinking, "don't forget to install the boot blocks"...of course, I then forgot to install the boot blocks. :-/ But yes, this process works. AFTER you remember to install the boot blocks. ON THE OTHER HAND, if all the machine is is a simple firewall, this is a really good time to simply re-install from scratch, just as you wanted it to be, copying over the config as needed. It will very possibly be faster to simply install OpenBSD on the new disk, enable PF, copy over pf.conf, and get to work, rather than manually copying over all the partitions, one at a time. Forgetting to install the boot blocks is annoying on some systems. :) Nick.
