On Tue, 16 Jul 2002, Brian Long wrote:
Ideally, we would simply pull them across the network (a long evening's work!) dumping them into one qtree on the NetApp. The second step would be to redistribute them into their new qtrees and, for us, conceptually straightforward because the homedirectory names can be pattern-matched into corresponding qtrees. In UNIX-speak, the equivalent of: mv qtree_tmp/<...>/dir_pattern_1 qtree_a mv qtree_tmp/<...>/dir_pattern_2 qtree_b (about five commands, one per qtree).
As the other poster stated, I would recommend running a script which combined everything into one step. I also recommend using rsync. You can rsync the data live right now or a few days before the migration. Then when the actual cutover takes place, lock the home dirs (no more writes) and rerun the rsync command. It will scan over the files and only copy those things that have changed.
Hmmm... rsync (rdist) ... good idea.
Why didn't I think of that? Especially as I'm already using "rdist" for the applications. Perhaps because I had an overriding concern about the regrouping aspect of our several thousand accounts from one set 100 subgroups "/home/oldserver/subgroup_1/user_a" into a new set of about five subgroups "/home/newserver/qtree_I/user_a": in effect, a rehashing (not a coagulation of old groups).
Anyway, I'm experimenting with "rdist" (sorry, not "rsync"!) at this moment, and it's looking promising.
Thanks, to you and the other folk who replied on-list and off-list. Much appreciated.