Moving from one server to another with rsync?

[Spear]

Hi,

I am currently in the process of migrating from RH 7.3 to RHEL ES 3.0 on my
system. Of course there is a lot of iles that will need to change server
(new server is ready). My question is of course what is the best way to do
this? My thought is rsync with a function like this:

1: Running rsync once to get all the files over to my new system
2: Running rsync several times to keep the files updated, only
updating/copying new/changed files to the new server
3: running rsync frequently to make sure everything is beeing copied.
4: Switching server.

And here are my questions:

1: Am i going about this all wrong? *lol*
2: Can i keep the user/group permissions?
3: Is there a website where i can find information about this kind of move?
4: Can i get all my http, mysql, sendmail etc copied this way?

This i what i have done in advance:

1: Installed Webmin and synchronized users/groups on both servers
2: Upgraded Apache from RH 7.3's 1.x to Apache 2.x..
3: Installed sendmail on the new server with all users and settings from RH
7.3
4: Installed mySQL with the same settings as on my RH 7.3 system
5: Found some information and ran the command:
rsync --verbose  --progress --stats --checksum --rsh=/usr/bin/ssh --recursiv
e --times --perms --links /www/kunder/web/* MYHOST:www

(This worked, however everything was copied into /root/www/* and not into
/www which i thought i had set up. Furthermore the ownership, chmod and
groupsettings for files was not copied. The /www/ is the home directory for
my clients. I guess i will have the same problem when trying this with mySQL
databases and sendmail etc).


I tried mounting the /www system on my new server through SMB and running
rsync, but this way i could not get the correct user/group permissions on my
server.

Hope someone could help or point me in the right direction.


Best regards, Terje Dahl
Norway