The two servers are almost identical; windows machines, running apache 2 as webserver and mysql 5 as database engine. So far when I had to move whatever webapplication I 'just' created a database dump, zipped/rared the folder with the webapplication in it and unzipped it on the new server, imported the database dump. Sometimes some changes had to be done in whatever config file (url, admin email, …) or permissions in the file system – but mainly the whole process should not take more than half an hour.
1.) First obstacle (that took me a while to figure out) was the fact that McAfee AV Enterprise 8.x was running on the new server. And – for whatever reason – this antivirus software prevents mysql databases to create temp-files bigger then a certain amount of space. So the small queries went through without problem, as soon as they exceeded a certain complexity they failed with throwing a mysql error. Eay (and long googled for) fix: Add the mysql temp folder to the exception list of the on-access-scanner of McAfee.
If you use any version of phpmyadmin prior to 2.11.7 and Firefox 3 together to export Mysql database dumps, if they are g-zipped the resulting dumps are corrupt. Really great since I used the gzip option a lot, i lost quite some time re-doing work I already had done.
Well. Glad it works now, not so glad it took me that long to find out.
ups yes. that was a typo, thx for pointing that out!