We just obtained some accounts that are currently on an HSphere box in a different data center, and we'd like to move them to one of our boxes here at SM. Can anyone recommend a way to move them directly from one box to the other? We're planning to tar them, download them to our local machine and upload them to the new box, but is there a better way?

I don't know of any hsphere to cpanel script to do this for you so this may likely be a manual process. Don't forget to tar up all of the components, not only the home directories, but also mysql, etc from all of the servers in the cluster. And since hsphere sets up their home directory differently than cpanel, this will require some manual work to get these directories situated and associated with domains properly. You may want to move one at a time and hopefully things will get easier as the moves progress. Btw, you may lose some things such as mail since hsphere uses qmail and not exim which cpanel uses. And many things such as domains, various accounts (mail/ftp), etc may need to be setup one at a time (although both use the same ftp server so some of this may copy over).

I would ask http://www.dynamicnet.net/services/hsphere.htm about this, their knowledge about H-Sphere is pretty good

Thanks for the tips! From what I've seen so far, I have to say the HSphere carries a pretty steep learning curve when you're used to Cpanel.

I'll let you know how the move goes. Wish me luck!

True, hsphere makes cpanel look easy when it comes to some things. I've had more headaches in the last 2-3 months setting up my hsphere servers than I did with 9 months of cpanel. But there are pros and cons to each setup.