Moving HDD with FreeBSD installed between machines with different hardware.

[Dan MacMillan]

Hello,

I have a machine with FreeBSD installed on it that is serving DNS, CVS, NTP
and a few other things for our organization.  I plan to add a mail gateway
using Postfix, ClamAV, amavisd-new and SpamAssassin as well to protect the
tender underbelly of our MS Exchange server.  However the machine is running
5.1-RELEASE.  It shouldn't be.  :)

I would like to rebuild the machine completely to exercise the knowledge I
have gained re: FreeBSD but I can't afford for it to be down for the length
of time it would take and I don't have a standby machine available.  So what
I'm thinking is that I could take a spare hard drive home and pop it in one
of my own machines, install FreeBSD on that, and then bring it back to work
and swap the hard drive out with the one in the production machine.

What kind of problems am I letting myself in for if I go ahead with this?
The hardware in the two machines in question is quite dissimilar.  For
example, one's an Athlon 266 with 64MB of RAM, one's a Pentium[-something]
300 with 400 MB.

Here are the things that occurred to me:

One of them has an 'rl0' NIC, the other 'dc0'.  So I'd have to change the
ifconfig_ line in /etc/rc.conf.  But would this also imply changes elsewhere
that would have to be made?

Actually, that's all I've thought of so far.  Are there any gotchas I should
be considering?

--
Danny MacMillan