[CentOS] Cloning Centos server with RSync - what to exclude?

Thu Oct 8 18:25:41 UTC 2009
Bob Puff@NLE <bob at nleaudio.com>

Hi all,

I have a few CentOS servers that I want to mirror live, to be standby 
spares.  The "spare" machines could be either a different machine (with 
a different motherboard), or a VM in Vmware server.

I've used rsync in the past, which works well for doing it while the 
machine is live.  However, I want the destination to be running 
different hardware, and have a different IP address assigned to the 
nic.  My goal is to rsync everything -except- the files that pertain to 
the network interface, and the file system mount points.

My process is this:
1. Install Centos on "spare" machine, configure for proper ethernet.
2. Rsync from live to spare, excluding files pertaining to NIC and FS.

Then if it needs to go live, I simply change the IP address, and I'm off 
and running.

The question is: what do I exclude?  I know 
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/, /etc/fstab, and /etc/modules*, but what 
else?  I think there may be some stuff in /var also that deals with 
raid, etc.  The live computer is running software raid, while the backup 
will not.

Bob