After a long quiet period, I decided I ought to upgrade the 1Gb disk in crimson to something a little larger. The rather meagre size was stopping me from installing pretty much anything interesting.
Given the BIOS of the Compaq was old, I purchased a disk just under 8Gb (Quantum Fireball). I'd had a bad experience trying to install a 17Gb disk with a similarly old machine under Windows 95, and I didn't want to have to mess with disk address translation software again.
After installing the drive, I first reloaded Windows 95, on a 1GB partition, leaving the remaining space for Linux. I re-installed Linux, using the following filesystems: /, /home, /usr, /usr/local, /var and swap. I wasn't sure which filesystems needed the most space, so I left about 2Gb of space unused - for future eventualities.
I decided to upgrade to Redhat 7.1 (kernel based on 2.4.2-2) - now I probably had enough disk space to manage it OK. On the first install, complaints were levelled at the amount of swap I had. This was probably due to the fact I'd put in a little bit more memory since I'd re-installed Redhat 5.2 (total memory now a massive 48Mb). I also found that my /usr filesystem was not large enough to take the new 7.1 /usr.
Using the spare disk space, I extended swap to 130Mb (overkill, just
to make sure the 7.1 install didn't complain again), and created a new
partition (/dev/hda11) for the new /usr at a size of 1.5Gb. Now I had
to convince 5.2 that my /usr filesystem was on /dev/hda11. I used
cpio -p (pass-thru) to copy the old /usr tree to the new
/dev/hda11 filesystem (on a temporary mount point). Then I modified
/etc/fstab to mount /dev/hda11 on /usr at boot time. Rebooted while
crossing my fingers. Yep, came up OK! Retried the upgrade to 7.1,
which completed without problems.
Filesystems are now as follows:
/dev/hda5 on / /dev/hda6 on /home /dev/hda11 on /usr /dev/hda7 on /usr/local /dev/hda9 on /var /dev/hda8 on /data (this was the old 5.2 /usr filesystem)Well, I thought the upgrade went OK. However, I found that all my samba configuration files had to be redone, as the location for these files in Redhat 7.1 was /etc/samba. Not a major problem, as I had squirrelled these away some time ago. Something had changed in samba. In my old scheme, I had a smb.conf.WinNT file, which turned on password encryption for my NT laptop from work. Now, I could no longer access samba shares. After a little digging around, I found that I had to setup a smb.conf.%m file; i.e. a configuration filename based on the machine name, rather than the operating system name. It seemed that Windows 2000 was translated into an operating system name of UNKNOWN. I never followed this up, so my diagnosis is uncertain.
