Changing the UUID is a good plan. But the thing is while the system might be technically usable now, you need to make sure of a few things. All of these notes are based on my notes for server setup using Ubuntu 12.04:
Networking Adjustments: Unsure what the older setup’s networking settings were compared what they should be on Vultr, but chances are high that should be adjusted. If you can login to the machine, I would recommend running ifconfig
to get a raw readout of interface data. As far as networking adjustments go, that would happen in /etc/network/interfaces
which can be viewed/edited like this:
sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces
That said, if you can reach the machine, chances are that there is a DHCP setting? Regardless I would look in there to change things and if you are unsure how to do that, contact Vultr support, tell them exactly what you did and what you need to change. Pretty confident they will write back right away with a small list of networking settings you should adjust.
Update Grub: This may or may not be an issue, but you should login and run the following command:
sudo update-grub2
That will force the system to update the Grub boot loader settings. But if you notice a delay it might be a timeout on the Grub boot loader setup itself. Sometimes—and honestly it}s been hard for me to determine when or how—Grub will hang seemingly forever waiting for user interaction in selecting a boot device. If you are 100% sure you do not have to boot into anything other than the Ubuntu kernel you have in place, I would recommend adjusting the default Grub settings in this file:
sudo nano /etc/default/grub
Find this line:
GRUB_TIMEOUT=2
Now comment that out—or remove it—and then replace it with this new setting as well as an additional setting for GRUB_RECORDFAIL_TIMEOUT
like this:
GRUB_TIMEOUT=0
GRUB_RECORDFAIL_TIMEOUT=$GRUB_TIMEOUT
Now run the Grub update command again:
sudo update-grub2
And see what happens on reboot. If this was this issue, reboot should be fairly quick in comparison to previous.
And past any of this you state:
It’s also worth noting that I have taken this approach because I want
to keep the new server exactly as my old/current is, rebuilding the
server is out of the question. I simply don’t have the time.
Well, how much time have you actually saved between migrating, being confused about settings and now hashing it out here? Is this a perceived savings of time issue that actually does not actually add up to time actually being saved?
Don’t get me wrong; I am happy to help. But in general the way I setup Linux servers—and I mainly deal in Ubuntu—is I have a very well tested formula for creating a solid base server from scratch. It now takes me about 1 hour to do this; might take longer depending on system speed and such. But once I have that solid foundation down, the configuration of applications and users becomes almost a rote afterthought.
So perceptions of time saved might have the face the unknown realities of pure clone copying like this: By installing from a clean Linux distro to start with and then building a solid foundation on top of that, you basically make all of your Linux systems more portable without the unforeseen “gotchas” of a cloning process like this.