Cannot move a site to the local server I am a complete newbie to Drupal, although I have many years of PHP development and even more years as a system administrator. My task is to move a few Drupal sites from CentOS 5.x/Drupal 6.x to Centos 6.x and Drupal 7.x

My plan is to move all sites to Centos 6.x and then upgrade to 7.x (if possible).

I downloaded the first drupal site using rsync and then I exported the relevant database with mysqldump.

I imported the database and created the appropriate mysql user with the same permissions as in the production server. 

Important: In my local server I use the domain "testsite.local"
The production domain is "testsite.com". 

Now, the problem: When I enter testsite.local in my browser, all I see is the Drupal page saying that I have not created a first page!

I am almost sure that this is a configuration problem, but I cannot pin-point it. Can you help me?
You need to configure Drupal to connect to your new database. 
Also, make sure you have copied all the dot-files (.htaccess) as well. You will realize using a version control system is faster than rsync (although rsync is much faster than copying all files again and again). 

Site migration instructions are nicely said in this drupal.org article. It's a lengthy one, so I'm quoting the part that you probably need to fix your site from current state. 


  Make changes to the “Database settings” section of the settings.php
  file, to ensure that they are pointing to the new database, with the
  right user (which may be different that the one you used on the old
  computer) and the right password. You may also have to adjust the
  “base URL” if you are moving between a sub-domain and a domain level.
  If you are moving the site to a new domain, or to localhost, also
  check that "$cookie_domain" is not set to your old domain.