Hi

I have an Ubuntu server thats handling file and print sharing and a postfix mail server for my network as well as being a Samba domain controller for my WinXP clients. The physical server itself though is too slow and its only got a 40GB hard drive so i'm upgrading to brand spanking new server with a RAID array and a lot more memory. What would you suggest is the best method to move my current installation from my old server onto the new one? I'd like to upgrade the distro a newer one too (Gutsy to Hardy and see this as a good opportunity to do so. Can i tar the entire hard drive of my old server and restore it onto a new install, as long as i exclude /dev and /sys? sounds a bit too easy to me. Any recommendations?

You can tar it if you want, but I'd just copy the whole thing over the lan to the new destination. I think I would skip /tmp and /var/run (in fact, look /var over carefully...you can skip a lot of it) as well as /dev and /sys, but when you do that then, yes, your system will run on the new hardware.

You'll probably have some minor issues - like in fstab and possibly with some network config things - but nothing big, presuming you are using a stock kernel.