I am maintaining a server. how to create a replica of it? after creating partitions in local machine which acts as a replica, if i copy
server's / to local's /
server's /boot to local's /boot
server's /home to local's /home
server's /var to local's /var
server's /usr to local's /usr
..and so on. and installing vsftpd,httpd etc. is it possible or what to do? can i get it..
lots of thanks for any help..

Hi bkcreddy17,

You're quite on the right track. The easiest way indeed is to copy all file systems to the local box. You have two options for this: setup a dump | restore pipeline which makes sure that you copy per filesystem including all permissions etc. Or you can setup a tar | untar pipeline which is not restricted to a single filesystem, but again makes sure that you copy permissions and restrictions.
After copying all information, you need to adjust the network information on the local box (somewhere in /etc, depending on your distribution) and you need to boot from a rescue / installation cd in order to install the boot loader.
There's no need to install additional software, as all software will be in the filesystem copy you performed...

Good luck,

Alex

Is this for backup purposes, or something more like failover clustering?

In either event, the easiest thing would be to make an image of the drive in question, or at least image the partitions of the drive geometry won't be the same.

Take care of files in /etc that have configuration files for the network address, both IP and MAC, database of users/groups that are (may be) not the same on the both machines.

There are certain directories you don't want to copy and don't need, like /tmp and /proc. /proc gets dynamically created based on the kernel and hardware on your new system