Need to move a debian server from i686 to x86_64 architecture

Posted by user64204 on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by user64204
Published on 2012-03-23T07:58:53Z Indexed on 2012/03/23 11:32 UTC
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I have a debian server that I need to move from one hosting provider to another. I don't really know how the old server was setup, all I know is that it's running a Ruby on Rails application with a lot of custom libraries installed and that I should prepare myself for a painful migration.

Old server:
-os: debian 5.0.9
-used disk space: 3.2GB
-architecture: i686

New server:
-os: debian 5.0.9
-free disk space: 10GB
-architecture: x86_64

As you can see the problem is that the servers are running different architectures.

Q: Is there anyway I could somehow migrate the old to the new server in a few steps (or am I just dreaming I could) ?

I was thinking maybe I could:
-get list of packages and gems installed on old server and use for loop to install them all on the new
-copy the disk content from old to new server while excluding what is architecture-specific (the problem is that I don't really know what to exclude).

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