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I am migrating the Solaris Server to a Linux based one. I was thinking about using the same DNS/URL for the Solaris box for the new Linux Server. It would help me as - Users don't have to make any changes and i just need to switch over to new Linux boxes once i am all set. I am not really aware of the concept of DNS/DNS porting I assume it is a sort of URL rewriting. Any material or assistance would be a great help.

Balualways
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    Your question is not entirely clear. You can use the same hostname, though having two boxes with the same hostname up on the network simultaneously is likely to cause problems. You can't use the same IP address for two boxes simultaneously without conflicts, but you can put the new box up on the old box's IP when you take the old box down. Your DNS server shouldn't be affected by the server switch unless the server being replaced is your network's DNS server. – Darael Jul 31 '12 at 20:13
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    Generally Server Fault is designed to assist professional administrators. The way this question is worded does not sound like you have a professional understanding of how DNS works. If that's not the case you may want to try and clean up your question to get a better answer. – Brent Pabst Jul 31 '12 at 20:22

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With DNS you should be able to simply change the IP address the DNS record points to the IP address of the new server. This way you have both failback capabilities as well as testing abilities.

This is a pretty common requirement and standard practice.

Brent Pabst
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Without more information on exactly what you're trying to do we can't tell you what the right solution is. I can however tell you with a high degree of confidence that setting up a complicated URL rewriting scheme is almost certainly the wrong solution.

Depending on how your site is structured your most likely strategy is to either take the Solaris box offline and replace it with the Linux box (give the Linux box the IP the Solaris box was using), or to perform a DNS swap like Brent suggests (bring the Linux box up on a new IP, and update DNS so your hostname points at the new IP).

The chief difference between the two options is that with a server swap (giving the Linux host the IP of the old Solaris host) your site will cut over "hard" (and there will be a brief outage window while you swap the IP).
With a DNS swap there will be no outage, but there will be an indeterminate period where traffic may go to either server (the length of this period is governed mainly by your DNS records' TTL value).

Since you say you are not really aware of the concept of DNS/DNS porting I STRONGLY suggest you get someone with more experience to guide you through this process, at least the first time.
The consequences of messing it up can range from as benign as few minutes of downtime (on a simple static site for personal use) to a huge mess and expensive consulting bills (on a complicated E-Commerce platform).

I also suggest picking up a copy of DNS and BIND at your earliest convenience and skimming through the chapters on how DNS works -- This is an invaluable reference.

Mike Pennington
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voretaq7
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