A few months back I setup a Samba server and joined it to my AD domain. It took a long time to configure troubleshoot and work out the bugs so the two platforms would communicate. Now I want to put up another host but don't want to have to go through all the configuring, installing services and so on. Is there a way to just duplicate the existing server and put it on a new server? In Windows I use Symantec Ghost to perform this function. Someone suggested to just copy the etc directory from the existing box to the new box, but I have a hard time beleiving that it would be that easy. Any other suggestions?

You could bootup with a livecd like knoppix and use partimage to make images of the partitions. Then you can restore them to a machine with similar hardware.