I am going to move to new AIX server and the question is how to correctly and painless move the whole configuration? I mean for example users, network, and - what is very important - the whole printer system configuration? I think users are simple to move - only /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow. The problem can be with moving the printers' configuration - there are many definied printers in old system. What files should I take into consideration while moving the printers' configuration?
If the old and the new machine have a tape drive: use the tapedrive to create a mksysb tape on the old machine (man mksysb) and use this tape to install the new machine.
Basically a mksysb-image is a "savevg rootvg" along with a bootloader to boot and install from it.
If you do not have a tape drive, but you have another AIX machine, do the following:
make sure this other AIX machine is higher or at least equal in terms of OS release/fix level. (how to check this: man oslevel, man instfix)
Install on this machine the NIM-server package and configure the machine as NIM server.
Define the old machine as client to this NIM server, test connection
on the NIM server, create a NIM-resource of type mksysb (this in fact creates an mksysb which will be bootable too in a file on the NIM-server)
define the new machine as another NIM client
allocate the mksysb resource for this machine and start installing via network
In case you want to go with the NIM solution be sure to read the IBM documents about NIM, which is quite a powerful and complex system. Besides the man page there is a good description in the info system and there are some redbooks. You might want to read this post to get some head start about NIM.
In case you have already a NIM server somewhere in your environment you could use this of course.
Beware: It is possible to create an mksysb in a plain file too, instead of a tape or via NIM. This file will NOT be bootable, though and you therefore won't be able to restore the machine from scratch using only this file.