[Tfug] Migrating users....

[JD Rogers]

Hi Chris,

> I'm migrating a large number of users (45) from one machine to another. I

I did this  a while back, but my setup was redhat to debian and one
thing to watch out for us user numbers. I was able to keep all the
passwords by copying users (line at a time) from /etc/passwd,
/etc/group and /etc/shadow. I didn't have any issues with this MD5 vs
crypt vs MySQL though.

One thing to watch for is user numbers. The reason I copied the users
line at a time is so I could avoid stomping on the user numbers which
start at 500 for redhat and 1000 for debian. I found out the hard way
that an NFS mount gets very confused when the user numbers don't
match, so I had to use usermod and sync all the user numbers. I doubt
it would matter if you don't have two systems using the same mount,
but something to watch for in case you are copying the users files
over and the filesystem keeps the user number instead of username. .

>>> Is there a reason you're not using a centralized directory system (LDAP,
>>> etc.)?
>>
>> Yes.
>
> Hah!

Double Hah!


JDR