Easy in Linux, almost impossible in windows.

Especially if you do not have the programs install disks. Here is what happened. One of our servers, which for some forgotten in the mists of time reason, was in a RAID0 configuration and had a hard disk that decided to give up the ghost. Of course this means that the machine stopped dead in its tracks and telephones started acting very loud. Fortunately the database on that machine was working off of an NFS share so I was able to move that over to our other server and start it up very quickly. A simple tnsnames.ora address change and and we were off and running. The real tricky part came later. The last service that needed to be supplied effected a lot of people and they were unable to work without it. This service was locked to the MAC of the server. After a bit of thought a LED started glowing dimly and virtual machine flickered across my mind. Fortunately I had a suitable Cent0S5 virtualbox machine ready so I was able to fire that up. Give the network adaptor the same MAC as the problem server and copy the programs directory over. A little bit of configuring of the network to give it the same name and IP address and everything was good to go. The users of that service do not even know that they are running off of a different machine. Because it was Linux I was able to quickly and easily make these changes with minimum disruption to others. If it were windows I would be searching for missing dll's, registry entries and who knows what else. That's it, I just wanted to crow a bit and share my Linux excitement :) Just to clarify things a bit more. The old Linux was RHEL3 and the virtual machine is CentOS5. It is like directly copying a program from windows 2000 to windows vista. Yet it worked without a hitch.