Every three or four years
Every three or four years, depending on how a company writes off its hardware, you have machines to replace. Now, replacing a box with a few cables on it isn't hard: you rip the old cords out of the wall and throw the lot on the dump. After that, you place the new boxes in your data centre and plug in all the cords in their respective sockets.
But that isn't quite all there is to it, is it?
You then install a base operating system. If you are lucky, nothing much has changed and you load backup tapes (or whatever media you've used) and restore from that. If you aren't so lucky (as what happened to me), the machine you are replacing wasn't quite, shall we call it up to date?
In that case, it is more or less a start from scratch kind of operation. Software has changed, you decide to use a different IMAP server, the MTA configuration needs tweaking, Apache's authentication modules have changed (for the, it must be, trillionth and a half time), etc., etc., etc.
Oh, well, I'm all done.
Well: not quite. There is still half a load of utilities and stuff that need recompiling (new version of GCC, you know), but I should be getting there soon.
I hope. 
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