Moving my webserver to a new machine

[Chris G]

On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 10:37:54AM +0000, Michele Zarri wrote:
>    Hello,
> 
>    I searched the email archive and googled for it but did not have much
>    luck.
> 
>    Currently I am running my webserver on my main desktop however I would
>    like to move it to a old laptop for the following reasons:
>    1. the power consumption of the laptop is much lower than that of my
>    desktop (60Watts maximum)
>    2. I need to dual boot my main desktop in Windows Vista since my wife has
>    an ipod touch and she's not happy with the alternatives to iTunes. (I
>    cannot install Windows Vista on a virtual machine because it came
>    pre-installed and I do not have the DVD to re-install. All I have an image
>    in a "recovery" partition of the hard disk. When I do so, clearly the
>    server goes down.
> 
>    Currently there is not much on the webserver, just Gallery2, Wordpress and
>    a couple of pages, but I do not want to have to reinstall or fiddle with
>    the pictures (Gallery2) and blog entries (Wordpress) databases.
> 
>    The new webserver (the laptop) has a pristine intrepid ubuntu server
>    installed as well as the gnome desktop (I am not fully converted to
>    command line).
> 
>    Any suggestion?
>    Is it sufficient to move the relevant files across? If so, what are the
>    relevant files?
> 
Things like Gallery2 and Wordpress tend to put (and/or change) files
in a number of places.

The bulk of the installed software tends to in:-
    /usr/share/<name of application>

Then there will probably be something in /etc/apache2/conf.d.

There *may* be something in /var/www but this is less likely.

Dependencies (i.e. libraries etc.) will probably pull in stuff all
over the place, /usr/lib, /usr/bin, etc.

So it's difficult just to " move the relevant files across?".

I think the easiest way is to install (using synaptic or apt-get) the
application on the new machine and then move the data across.  You may
well find some assistance on how to do this if you look in the FAQs
and other documentation on the websites (i.e. on the Gallery2 and
Wordpress web sites).  Sometimes there are explicit 'export' and
'import' commands that make things simple.

-- 
Chris Green