I have a working Linode running. However, I'm planning to update it. To avoid running two Linode's during testing I did the deployment of the new system on my own workstation in VMWare server.
Testing is done, and the vmware image/system works like it should.

Now I want to migrate it onto my Linode. I plan to do this using rsync. I've mounted the new disk images inside the old system under /new/, /new/usr and /new/var. Now what should I sync/not-sync?

the /new/ partition is a Linode Debian 4.0 deployment. So it should have the /dev partition fully populated. Rsync'ing /proc, /tmp or /sys is probably also useless. Are there any other directories I have to exclude?

You might want to be careful with the networking setup in /etc/network/interfaces. Also, /boot is unneeded on the linode, but I doubt it will do any harm.

_________________
The irony is that Bill Gates claims to be making a stable operating system and Linus Torvalds claims to be trying to take over the world.
-- seen on the net

Do I need the /lib directory? It is filled with modules for the kernel on the VMWare system. The kernel for the UML system is not in my filesystem I think. So what part of the /lib directory is redundant?

/lib/modules isn't needed. /lib/tls (and /usr/lib/tls) can probably go, but verify the thing still works properly, just in case.

Most everything else in /lib should be left alone.

_________________
Rgds
Stephen
(Linux user since kernel version 0.11)

some flavor of rsync probably would of been best.