On 19 September 2016 at 17:08, Paul Tansom paul@aptanet.com wrote:
I had a server I was replacing that was running Debian and the new hardware (customer supplied) had nVidia chipsets throughout. Graphics and sound were no problem since bing a server had no need (no desktop), but i/o was a major issue since Debian didn't supply the drivers because of the licensing, etc.. I spent a while trying, but ended up trying Ubuntu 16.06 (which sort of dates this!) and that is one of the things that pushed my switch of distro. If I'd just swapped disks it wouldn't have worked.
Indeed: this is the issue with non-free drivers. There are other situations too; the new PC may have hardware that the old PC's kernel doesn't support, for example. Neither tends not to be a problem if the old PC has been kept up to date and only uses supplied drivers.
Video hardware can be an issue, because it's one area where non-free drivers are more common. But even so usually it'll boot to a commandline from which it can be fixed. Modern systems have empty Xorg.conf files and will adapt to changed hardware fairly well anyway.
I wouldn't use it instead of backup, but a software RAID mirror works very nicely under Linux to improve resilience
RAID is good protection against a disk failure. It's zero protection against accidental deletion, or malware, or a myriad of other things that backups protect from.
However, if a disk fails, having a system that keeps going regardless but notifies you, and which can relatively easily get back into a redundant state on the addition of a new disk (which can even be done without shutting down if you have hot-swap hardware), is pretty neat. In mostly-read situations it may also improve performance (as you have two drives to read from). It allows you to use two drives from different manufacturers so you're protected against batch or design faults. All that for the cost of a second disk, which is usually a fairly small cost.