[lug] User Account Migration

rm at mamma.varadinet.de rm at mamma.varadinet.de
Mon Jul 9 10:56:56 MDT 2001


On Mon, Jul 09, 2001 at 09:48:08AM -0700, Stephen Smith wrote:
> I have recently inherited a Debian box that is
> stuck (forever) in Washington DC.
> The server has approx. 600 user accounts doing
> POP mail only.
> I want to migrate these users to a new RedHat server
> here in my Denver location and was wondering if
> someone
> could point me to a migration HOWTO type document.

I don't know about a migration-HOWTO, but i might be
able to give a few hints. But first of all an important
question: does the old box use shadow passwords?
Moving the accounts shouldn't be too hard, even so you
might end up with a lot of network traffic (if your new
users have as much mail as i tend to have ;-)

Last time i did this i wrote a small perl script that
munged the old /etc/passwd file and created the appr.
directories on the new box and changed ownership of them.
It might be tricky to keep the mail directories consistent
unless you can live with a short time of unavailability.

One thing you might consideris moving away from having
all users in /etc/passwd to using LDAP or database based
user management.


 Ralf

> OR
> 
> Maybe let me know a few hints on user migration
> between
> the two Linux distributions.
> 
> Things to remember type of stuff..
> 
> SGS
> 
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