SUMMARY: Transferring users between systems

Excuse the late summary (holidays etc)...

Anyway thanks to:
Chris Scheller, Mike Kercher, John Madden, Stu Tomlinson
Martin Eskildsen, Bishop, Tobias Kaboth, Brett Geer and
Salvatore Sferrazza

What it essentially comes down is to copy 
/etc/passwd
/etc/shadow
/etc/group
/etc/aliases 

from the old machine to the new being careful not to clobber what's
already there (i.e. basically any id above 499 is a fairly safe bet
although there may be some above 99). This will only work if the
password hashing scheme is the same. Otherwise all passwords will need
to be reset.

Then rsync (using -u and -g options) the home directories from the old
machine to the new. Alternatively tar everything copy across and untar.
Since uids and gids are the same from the files copied earlier,
permissions stay intact.

Apparently there is a "little perlly script" around that does everything
bar copy the data between the home drives. Possibly as part of an RPM -
never did find anything although I didn't look that hard.

I knew the basic idea, but thought there might be a tool to do what I
want. Now it's been explained it seems quite simple to do by hand really
(assuming password hashes are the same - if they aren't no tool will
help)

Thanks
CH

> -----Original Message-----
> From: linuxmanagers-bounces-35TzE1X9F6582KRnZfj+bdi2O/[email protected] 
> [mailto:linuxmanagers-bounces-35TzE1X9F6582KRnZfj+bdi2O/[email protected]] On Behalf Of 
> Christian Hack
> Sent: Friday, 19 December 2003 5:13 PM
> To: Linuxmanagers
> Subject: Tansferring users between systems
> 
> 
> I have two machines, one is the old firewall/mail/dns etc and one is a
> new one with new hardware and a new OS install (the old one was RH6.2
> patched to within an inch of it's life so it's a bit beyond 
> upgrading).
> 
> How can I easily transfer users and passwords across? Home directory
> content isn't a problem but I will need new ones created with correct
> permissions. It's mainly passwords I don't want to have all users redo
> if possible. I'm toying with a simple script to pull the 
> usernames, gids
> etc out of the passwd file and the passwords from the shadow file and
> running them though I would have though this would be a relatively
> common operation.
> 
> Can't seem to google anything and surely someone here has done this
> before.
> 
> Thanks
> CH
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