Hello, everyone. Tomorrow night I'm moving everything on my server over to a new machine - To a 2.4GHz P4 from my 350MHz PII. I'll be doing a fresh install, naturally, and wanted a few pointers. I'm going to be installing SuSE 10.0 from the internet (using boot CD) but wanted to make suer I would be getting everything the newest. I'd like of course PHP5 and MySQL5, and the newest version of apache. I'd like to use YaST, of course, so that I can keep up with newer versions in the future, etc. Anyone have any comments here?

Also, I think I can transfer everything over pretty easy, exceppt for the MySQL database. Shouldn't I be able to just copy over the /var/lib/mysql to the new one and that will make an identical copy?

Thanks!

The usual way to make a mysql move is to do a mysqldump on the first machine and a mysql recieving input from the result:

mysqldump -u root -p database > database.sql
This creates a text file containing all the commands to create the database on the new machine. To do the move, you may want to compress the file or tar the several files for convenience and speed.
tar czf compressedfile.tar.gz database1.sql database2.sql ...

mysql -u root -p mysql < database.sql
This runs the commands in the file to create and populate the database. You have to do this for all databases. This is also the procedure for doing backups. It is not guaranteed to migrate from one version of mysql to the next, but moving the database files is almost certain to fail because the file format often changes.

You will still have to create the user of the database and give permissions.

If the database is for a dynamic website, the database may not contain all the data but links to the storage site for files and stuff. You will need to move that as well.