I went the first step today to moving my home server to Debian - I installed the base system on the internal disk. While I was doing this, I had the external hard disk which contains my complete Ubuntu server plugged into my laptop and everything was fully up and running, from Hubzilla to Matrix-Synapse.
I could, of course, keep doing that, but it's a hassle having to switch the hardware around every time, set up the network again on the laptop, and changing the port forwarding settings on my router. I would only do that if I don't have anything else planned that day :-P
For now, I plugged the Ubuntu disk back in to the mini PC and have it up and running like normal. I'm wondering if I can just
chroot
into the Debian partition and install and set everything up from there.
I did this, which is what I learned a long time ago from an article on re-installing GRUB from a live CD:
mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev
mount --bind /dev/pts /mnt/dev/pts
mount --bind /sys /mnt/sys
mount --bind /proc /mnt/proc
apt commands seem to work fine, but I'm wondering how well this would work with, say importing mysql databases.
Are there any limitations to what I can do on the system I chrooted into? Is there a risk to my main system, can I screw that up somehow?
The advantage of doing this would be that I could do it bit by bit, whenever I have a little time, instead of taking one day and do just that.