On Sun, 2006-03-05 at 09:20, Thomas E Dukes wrote: > I can put both online but have never used rsync nor dump. The old pc is > old! A P3-450, 18GB HD. The new one is a P4-3.0Ghz with 1GB ram. The way > CentOS will do the partitions will probably be different than from the old, > especially the SWAP. The old system has been upgraded numerous times since > RedHat 8.0. I like the idea of a fresh install but want to make sure I have > everything working on the new without missing something I installed on the > old one. > > Decisions, decisions............. Version-level upgrades are always a bad idea because they can leave old stuff around. I'd recommend taking this opportunity to clean things up with a fresh install and only copy over the contents of the home directories and any ftp or web sites that might be set up. Bring the new machine up with a different IP and name at first, then copy over things and configure it to match the old one, keeping a log of anything you have to do that isn't completely obvious. You can copy files with 'scp file newmachine:/path' or directories or files with: rsync -av -essh source newmachine:/path/to/target. Copy over /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow, /etc/group, /etc/gshadow and rsync the /home directory and any directories containing web or ftp sites. If you have trouble configuring any services, copy the old config file over to a new name on the new machine and diff them to see what you might have missed. When everything appears to be working, shut down services on the old one, rsync /var/spool/mail and repeat the rsync of /home and anything else that might have changed (these will go fast because rsync only copies changes). Change the name and IP on both the old and new machine and reboot. Note that routers may cache the ARP for the old mac address and have trouble reaching the changed IP for as long as 20 minutes, but machines on the same net should switch immediately (just in case you are working remotely...). If you find you missed anything later, you still have it on the old machine. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx