Switching FreeBSD machines

[Doug Poland]

On Wed, Dec 22, 2004 at 08:27:18PM -0500, RL wrote:
> Hi. I have FBSD 5.3 on one machine. I'm thinking of buying a Dell
> 420SC Server and would want to use FreeBSD on that. I went through a
> hard time getting things to work on my current machine such as Java
> and maybe a few other things, so I really would rather not start from
> scratch. And I don't want to swap hard-drives because the Dell comes
> with a nice Serial ATA drive I want to use. My only option might be to
> clone the old FBSD box using g4Unix and putting it on the Dell. Would
> kind of problems and headaches would I have with that?
> 
If you're tracking 5-STABLE, I would bring your current machine
up-to-date with STABLE and portupgrade all ports.  Then, create
packages out of all your ports (man pkg_create, pay attention to -b
switch).  Create .tar files of your home directory, /etc/mail,
/etc/namedb, and anything else you care about that's taken some time to
configure.  

One thing I do on all my boxes is use RCS for all config files.  It's a
simple and quick step to create a .tar out of all these directories
scattered about a box.  I back these files up regularly.  If I need to
rebuild a box, it's a simple OS install, whatever ports are needed, and
retrieve my config files from a tar.

On your new box, bring it up-to-date with -STABLE, and install packages
you created above.  Selectively un-tar above files as needed.

-- 
Regards,
Doug