From: Wesley Darlington (wesley at domain yelsew.com)
Date: Fri 10 Aug 2001 - 13:36:18 IST
Hello,
On Fri, Aug 10, 2001 at 12:01:12AM +0100, cnb at domain eircom.net wrote:
> I'm needing to move all the user accounts from one server to another. I've
> been told that I can copy the human user data from /etc/passwd and
> /etc/shadow from the old server into the respective file on the new (even
> thought I'm not even quite sure how to do that either).
> Then copy over the home directories. Then someone else said that wouldn't
> work.
> Anybody know the best way of doing it. There are a few hundred accounts,
> some being shell, most being passwd.
Do a few trial accounts first. You'll probably want to do a find for any
files that belong to each user you're moving - you may need to move more
than just their home directories. In particular, if you store mail in
/var/spool/mail or somewhere, you'll have to move that stuff. And rerouting
the mail could be a little messy.
Make sure that both machines use the same format for hashed passwords -
ie. both md5 or whatever. Make sure that you don't end up with duplicate
uids in the destination shadow/passwd files; that would be ... interesting.
Copy one user at a time. Make sure each user can log into no more
than one machine at any point in time. Make sure they aren't logged in
or running any processes when you're moving them. Make sure they know
what you're doing. Make sure they know to report any slightly strange
things to you. By phone if this might bugger up their email.
Just some things to consider...
Wesley.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.6 : Thu 06 Feb 2003 - 13:11:33 GMT