# Linux Admins: How Long Should This Take? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [November 16, 2011, 11:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linux-admins-how-long-should-this-take/603181 "2011-11-16T23:03:17Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Mr.Slant](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/c57346/32.png) [@Mr.Slant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr.Slant)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2011, 11:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linux-admins-how-long-should-this-take/603181/1 "2011-11-16T23:03:17Z")
I have a company that wants me to migrate them from one webserver to another. They have an aging Redhat system with 9 domains on it. The sites are served by Apache, and one of them hooks into a MySQL instance also housed on the machine. Both the old and new machines appear to be perfectly sound Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers. 6 GB of data must be moved. No on-site visits would be required. This shouldn’t be hard work for me, but in the past I’ve never timed myself doing this kind of work. How long should this migration take for a competent and thorough system administrator? ---
**Author:** ![Superfluous\_Parentheses](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/8edcca/32.png) [@Superfluous\_Parentheses](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Superfluous_Parentheses)\ **Post date:** [November 17, 2011, 12:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linux-admins-how-long-should-this-take/603181/2 "2011-11-17T00:18:05Z")
If there’s nothing too intricate going on, call it a day’s work, mostly for setting up a quick switch-over and making sure everything works after the migration (you may run into some unexpected stuff that nobody told you about). If everything is set up and configured exactly as you’d expect it to be, and you have a decent network connection to push the data around, it can be done in an hour or so. Personally I’d reserve the full day, and charge at least half a day. ---
**Author:** ![Mr.Slant](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/c57346/32.png) [@Mr.Slant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr.Slant)\ **Post date:** [November 17, 2011, 1:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linux-admins-how-long-should-this-take/603181/3 "2011-11-17T13:56:49Z")
Thanks, **Superfluous Parentheses**. Anyone else? ---
**Author:** ![si\_blakely](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/d9b06d/32.png) [@si\_blakely](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/si_blakely)\ **Post date:** [November 17, 2011, 2:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/linux-admins-how-long-should-this-take/603181/4 "2011-11-17T14:48:53Z")
I’d say about a day, too. But you need to check on things like PHP/Perl/… versions etc to ensure that the new server works with any dynamic content. Si