Day 1

Our K2000 is being replaced. The short version of the story is “an error code popped up and KACE is sending us a new system”.

Anyway, I thought this would be a great opportunity to document a worst case scenario. How much trouble is it to restore a K2000 back to how it once was?  To be honest, a lot of the stuff on there will not be missed. Forgotten bits of projects that have been completed or abandoned. On the other hand there are a few things that have become mission critical.

Day 2

 It has been one full working day since I was promised a new machine. I have received a few calls/emails from KACE and I acquired a tracking number. The new K2000 is due tomorrow and I was instructed to download an ISO. Apparently the server is lacking an OS. If this is true, it is a disappointment. The original was ready to go out of the box. Even after I install whatever is on the ISO, there will be updates to do. I was advised to run the exact release of the OS as the old system so my backup packages will import correctly.

Day 3

The K2000 was delivered by noon. And it did have an OS ready to go. So we got it installed in the rack, boot it up, entered network info, entered the license number, ran an update, set user authentication to see our LDAP, linked with the K1000 we have, import the packages from archive, and start the first test deployment. That took about 6 hours.

 Not bad. The moral of the story is “make sure you have backups somewhere off the kbox”, just in case.