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Old 22nd May 2009
Bruco Bruco is offline
Fdisk Soldier
 
Join Date: May 2008
Location: Kalamazoo, MI, USA
Posts: 61
Default Doing a fresh install - what to save?

I'm retiring my old FreeBSD 6.3 box because, well, it's dying. It blew the power supply, then one of the drives failed, plus all the hardware is at least 5 years old. It is time to upgrade.

So I have my fancy new home server built with lots of RAM and terabyte drives and it's running Debian (wait! I can explain!). I wanted to learn more about Linux and I wanted to be able to run VirtualBox, which isn't ready for BSD yet (though there's progress, which is very cool).

(Let me quickly share my thoughts on Debian: I picked it because people seem to like its stability, and that's my first priority for a box that's going to run 24/7. It's good - but it's almost too easy. What I mean is, when I configured samba on my FreeBSD box I edited smb.conf by hand. In Debian I just cllick a few things; it's practically like Windows. Now, that's not necessarily bad, but I liked how FreeBSD installed, gave me a command prompt, and then demanded I learn how to install X, configure apache, etc. Yes, I realize I can do things manually in Debian as well, but the thing is, FreeBSD FORCED me to learn, to do a lot of things by hand, and doesn't that make you more knowledgeable overall? Okay, I suppose this is more of a character flaw I have than anything, but I digress...)

Anyway, Debian is okay and all, but I don't want to abandon FreeBSD, because I really have liked using it. So I'm still going to run it, just virtually. It's still going to be my squid proxy server, and my apache server.

So, what I want to know is, when doing a fresh install, what should I back up from my old server (which may only live a few days longer)? I already have my data, but what about config stuff to reference? Here's what I figured so far:

/etc
/usr/local/etc

And that's about it. I imagine I'm missing something obvious (I've really only been playing with BSD for less than two years) and I'd be very grateful if anyone else had any suggestions.
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