G4 Mac OSX 10.4 server with RAID & sharepoints - Intel Xserve & RAID?

Question

Hey all,
so we need to migrate our G4 Power Mac running Mac OSX 10.4 server with about 60 user accounts and a RAID with about 50 sharepoints to a brand new Intel Xserve with 10.4 server and a brand new RAID.
My plan for the server part of things is to put the new server online with the old one still running, make the new one a replica of the old one, then take the old one offline and promote the new one to a master.
But what to do about the sharepoints and several terabytes of data? Is there any way to do this except manually copying the data and re-creating all the sharepoints? That wouldn't be the complete end of the world as long as all the accounts/groups come across via the replication, but it'd be nice if there's a smart way to do this.
Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

Never tried the replica promote so I can't say that it will work. The way I migrated from 10.4 to new hardware 10.4 server was to set the new server up with exactly the same setup, DNS, IP and so on. This requires the old server be off the network for a bit. Once it was running I would have a backup of the LDAP/OD info made directly from the old server in Server Admin. Import this on the new server and all users and passwords are back in place. Now as for the share points and the data the best thing to do is to attach the old RAID to the new unit first. Hopefully you have a way to have both RAIDs connected at the same time to the new unit since that would be best.
In the interest of downtime you could immediately add the share points back in to WGM pointing to the old RAID drives. This gives you the free time to migrated the data when you want to. Make sure you know the right settings for each protocols which you use for each share point (AFP, SMB, FTP, NFS).
Now that your up and running you can move data by whatever means you see fit to the new RAID keeping in mind you want to keep permissions in-tacked. There are many clone or sync option out there and you don't need to move all the share points at once.
The main reason I chose this method is it offers a fall back and no client reconfiguring. If something is not working on the new server you can simply plug the old RAID back to the old server and your up. Second is that if you try to run both server at the same time you would need to create a whole new identity for the new server (IP, DNS and so on). Migrate data via a Network (very slow) and reconfigure all clients to point at the new server. I've done this at least 10+ times at different locations and even before the easy 10.4 backup of LDAP/OD info. Making sure you had a clean LDAP was never so easy. All swap outs took less then an hour of down time with maybe 2 hour pre-swap setup. Data movement to a new RAID was not always the case but by using this method you can move data later which is the most time consuming process of the whole swap.