Server Migrations

Migrating server hosts is a pretty daunting task.  While the mechanics of it are pretty straightforward the details are killer.  You can spend days planning, migrating the static pieces, doing dry runs, etc. only to find out that you forgot about some critical piece.  I'm not a sysadmin so it's quite likely that the process can be made much easier with tools like puppet but even still it must take a lot of work to get the puppet config setup reliably.  The server I just moved had around a dozen virtual hosts running some combinations of Apache, PHP, Rails, and MySQL.  In addition, the server runs a few mailman lists so I had to get postfix and mailman running as well.  Throw in some ancillary stuff like memcached, subversion, setting up logrotation, enabling additional logs in syslog, setting up backup scripts (for snapshotting EBS volumes), etc. and it's increasingly difficult to finally pull the trigger.  So tonight, I lift a beer to you sysadmins.  Thanks for the magic.