Mving gnus to New host. Made a mess of it

[hput <hput3@fastmail.fm>]

I've attempted to move my entire gnus setup from one host to another.

Replicating all I could think of between hosts and building the same
hierarchies

Old setup /spoo/
              Mail
              News
              in

And /spool was symlinked at ~/spool/

~/ Mail and News symlinked at ~/Mail ~/News to the actual diretories
in /spool

All permission and etc were faithfully replicated (I think).

.newsrc
.newrc.eld
.gnus
.emacs
.nnmail-cache

All copied over

I moved /spool content  using rsync  to same location on new host

But now, when I start gnus, all the nnml directories show up with an
asterisk and have no messages.

First I tried scanning for news alt-g on a few nnml groups.

no soap ... checked and rechecked that files are in identical location
of both hosts, checked that all symlinks were in place.

Tried regenerating-nov-data to no avail

in server buffer clicked on nnml server hoping to resubscribe groups
The only thing that appears are the archive groups for news amd mail

I'm clearly missing something important... but at a loss of what to
look for.

Fortunately the old setup still works as it should so at least I have
that to reference.

Any sugestions appreciated.