[docvader]

I'm in the process of doing the same. According to vbulletin.com's instructions, your understanding is correct. You'll need to change the database/server settings in your config.php file once you've reuploaded your vbulletin files. You might also have to, after getting it all to work, alter some things in vbulletin admin area, such as the bb url setting. Uploading your vb files, making sure permissions are ok, and reconnecting to the newly uploaded and created database via includes/config.php, should do it.

The problem is, moving the databases. Especially if you have a large one. And, if you don't have ssh or telnet access on your new server.

PhpMyAdmin generally will not accept database transfers above 2mb. Which, doesn't do us any good. I've found that bigdump (http://www.ozerov.de/bigdump.php) is the way to do. Instructions are on that site. I've got some suggestions, however, if you go the bigdump route.

Run PhpMyAdmin and dump your database into a text sql file. You can either run the entire vb database at once, or, successively back up portions of the tables into different sql text files (and name them a.sql, b.sql, c.sql, putting all of the tables starting with "a" into the a.sql dump, etc).

Alter bigdump.php settings so that they match your msql user ID and password, table's settings.

Upload your text sql backups and bigdump.php into a "dump" directory on your new server.

Run http://yoursite/dump/bigdump.php

Now, the problem may arise, if you have a large database, whereby the new server will not allow more than 50000 "questions" per user. The install of your dump will fail. So, to bypass this problem, you need to create more users in mysql in your new server. How to do this depends upon the host that you have. Sometimes you can do it in your new host's control panel. Create ten or twenty more mysql users, that can access the new vbulletin database that you already created, and give them the same mysql access password. Then alter your bigdump.php file to include the new users. You get more "questions" as you reinstall the database, thus bypassing this error. I can tell you how to write this, if you go this route.

Alternatively, if you have ssh access, it's much easier.

To backup your mysql database (open a ssh window):
mysqldump --opt -Q -u dbusername -p databasename > /path/to/backupname.sql

New mysql don't require the opt command or q, you can sometimes do this:
mysqldump -u dbusername -p databasename > /path/to/backupname.sql

Upload "backupname.sql" to your new server, and restore:
mysql -u dbusername -p databasename < /path/to/backupname.sql

That's the easiest way, if you have ssh access.

Restoring via phpmyadmin, if it's a large file, will give you problems. phpmyadmin is not very good at working with large database restorations. Uploading table by table, especially if you have a heavily hacked board as I do, is a time consuming nigtmare, which is why I use my very unscientific a, b, c ... method.

Another option is to do a phymyadmin gzip or text dump of your entire database, upload it to your new server, and ask tech support to reimport it into the new database that you (or they) created.

Good luck. It's not an easy issue if you don't have ssh access, but bigdump works in most cases. And, as I've discovered, sometimes you have to "trick" the mysql server into using it successfully

rich
russbo.com