My schedule as of late has been incredibly hectic, as one can expect in a startup company.  However, I finally did get a chance to accomplish at least one goal on our portal - moving the database off our Virtual Machine to a real machine (a nice beefy machint at that!).  Well, this being the first chance I had to actually move a SPS 2007 portal from one machine to another, of course, I learned some things along the way.

1.  Moving the portal works really well with the built-in tools.  Simply, point, click and away you go

2.  Moving the SSPs doesn't work so well.  I got locked out of my own BDC Permissions on my new SSP.  When you first create your Portal and associate the portal with an SSP, the BDC permissions only add one user to its permissions set - the user you are currently logged in as.  As I was logged in as the Portal01 administrator, that was the only user that could access the BDC permissions.  When I moved the portal (and SSP) to the new machine the administrator on the new machine was locked out of the BDC permissions.  I actually had to create a new SSP and associate the portal with the new SSP in order to unlock the BDC permissions (and truly, I didn't unlock a thing - rather I just started over).  Most frustrating.  I'm almost certain that it is a bug (I have not yet upgraded to the TR yet) as I noticed another slight bug in there too:  When I'm in the SSP after the move I noticed the links to the central administration and the shared services administration pointed back to the old portal instead of the new one...very odd. 

Happy SharePointing!

Zandy