Migration planning - old system to new

[John]

Now that I've actually gotten the new system to boot, I need to figure
out how I'm going to migrate everything - users, data, MySQL, NAT,
firewall, apache, DHCP, gateway services BIND, Sendmail, etc., etc
from
FreeBSD 4.3-RELEASE #0: Thu Jan 22 19:44:16 CST 2004
to
FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE #0: Sat Nov 21 15:48:17 UTC 2009

Bit of a challenge, eh?

Not only that, but I'd like to update my UID scheme from a pre-standard
version (most of the UIDs are down in the 100s) to the new convention
so that I'm more in-line with the rest of the world.

My rough idea:

1) Create a "migrate" account in Wheel with home as /var/migrate
   so that I can do a dump/restore on "home" without messing things
   up
2) Start putting together all the pieces - trying to find update / conversion
   scripts whenever possible.
3) once things get close, do the dump/retore of home, and a tar/untar
   of /var/mail (since I'm moving it from a part of the /var filesystem
   to a filesystem of its own - doing a dump/restore on /var is not
   a practical migration strategy in any case)
4) Let people move in, try it out, see how things are
5) Fix everything found in #4
6) Try a cut-over and make sure all the network services work in the
   middle of the night sometime, then switch back
7) Nuke /home and /var/mail and migrate them again to get the latest version
8) Do the real switch
9) spend a couple of weeks fixing all the things that weren't so disastrous
   that they got picked up in #4.

Ideas / scripts / project plans / outlines - whatever?  Maybe I should
write a chapter for The Complete FreeBSD after surviving this...
-- 

John Lind
john at starfire.MN.ORG