Today was the day Mark [1] and I moved tower from Atlantic Internet [2] to our new colocation site, DinNet, [3] owned by our friend Kelly. [4]
We arrived and started our preparations for the move. We basically changed the IP address to use upon startup, the IP address used by Apache [5] and double checked the configuration of NTPD, the daemon that maintains the correct time. I also made the appropriate DNS changes and pushed them out to the primary servers (as listed with the various registars).
It was then the moment of truth: we shut the server down.
It was then a matter of disconnecting two cables (power and network), picking up the box, and driving from Boca Raton down to Pomapano Beach.
We ended up at Kelly's house (where we are colocating the box for now) and had to wait a few minutes for him to show up from work. He lead us in, we plopped the box down, connected power and network and turned the box on.
Worked with no problems.
Total down time: one hour.
No one else that uses the box (I run several mailing lists on it) even noticed it was down.
If only everything is this easy.
[1] http://www.conman.org/people/myg/
[2] http://www.aibusiness.net/