[Pan-users] Re: VVDQ : moving Pan

[Duncan]

beartooth posted <address@hidden>, excerpted
below,  on Wed, 22 Feb 2006 11:41:32 -0500:

> I've just installed Fedora on a newer better machine. I then did scp -rp
> .pan from the one I've been using, and it moved it all, or seemed to.

OK, I've never used scp (secure copy? serial copy?) as I've only always
had the one machine -- when I upgrade I upgrade a piece of hardware at a
time, so when I switch montherboards/cpus, I'm taking the hard disk,
complete with the old installation, with me, and when I switch hard
drives, I create partitions/raid-devices/logical-volumes/etc on the
new one and copy everything over (now on a 4x300gig SATA multi-raid array).
Then I usually keep the old one hanging around for awhile as a backup,
altho my experience with newer drives has been they don't last as long as
they used to and I've not been able to do that as reliably, the last
2-3 upgrades.

Anyway...  Have you verified it's the same version of PAN?  If you
switched to a CVS snapshot or some such during the upgrade, PAN's storage
format has changed, I believe.  Also, here it's not the .pan dir itself
that contains all that, but .pan/data/.  

Also note that your UID and GID numbers may be different on the new
installation.  Perhaps it was a permissions thing due to a different UID
for your user on the new machine?

Alternatively, sneaker-net it.  Hopefully you have a  CD or DVD burner
on the old machine and can burn a copy and then just mount it on the other
machine and copy stuff over.  I did that with a friend for awhile, here
a couple years ago.  Or... Take your old drive out of the other machine
and plug it into the new one, temporarily or make it a permanent second
drive if you aren't going to be using the old machine. Again, mount the
appropriate partition, and copy the data over to the new one.  This is
what my friend tended to do as he had a whole bunch of old clunker
machines (286-586 age mostly) and was mix and matching parts to get stuff
to work anyway (ever see flames shoot out of a power supply?  Not an
extraordinary event with the stuff he had!), so unplugging a drive from
one machine (while off, of course) and plugging it into another (while
off), to copy stuff from one to the other, was SOP (standard operating
procedure).

Finally, while floppy transfer would be impractical for a message cache of
any size, it should work for just the config files.  Some of your giganews
files will probably have to be split (man split for reference on a program
to do it, then just use cat redirected to a file to recombine) to fit on
the disk, but the others should be less than 1.44 meg each, if my pan
datadir is any indication.

Another alternative, particularly if you have a broadband connection,
tarball the thing and mail it to yourself, then untar on the new computer.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman in
http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/12/22/rms_interview.html