[CentOS] Migration Assistance

Tue Sep 6 00:39:46 UTC 2011
Simon Matter <simon.matter at invoca.ch>

> Good Afternoon,
>
> I have been tasked with migrating a machine sitting on RHEL 5.6 off a
> rackspace cloud server to a local machine. In order to cut costs we would

Whatever this "cloud" thing is, it can mean almost anything these days :)

> like to utilize Centos 5.6. I have done quite a bit of research and have
> as
> of yet been able to find a clear answer on how to accomplish this. I have
> installed Centos 5.6 locally and am in a time crunch to complete this. I
> am
> hoping that someone can explain how to achieve this requirement.
>
> I did create a .tar file of the / partition of the RHEL remote server and
> rsync'd it locally. Hopefully I can just copy certain files from this .tar
> file to the new machine. Any and all assistance is tremendously
> appreciated.

What I usually end up is to install the new system, then create rpm lists
on the source system and use yum/rpm on the target to make it have the
same packages. After that I apply all config changes (diff is really my
friend here) and rsync the data over.

I did a lot of migrations recently and I found it to be the best way with
just the simple tools: rpm, yum, diff, bash, rsync

Simon