Re: How do I migrate users to new Fedora installation?

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On Sat, 2007-09-22 at 12:56 -0500, Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:
> Craig White wrote:
> 
> > always risky to edit /etc/passwd /etc/shadow & /etc/group manually.
> > 
> > make backup copies first
> > 
> > be certain to add the exact matching lines from /etc/passwd
> > & /etc/shadow from the old versions to the new.
> > 
> > I feel the obligation to add that if you were using LDAP for backend
> > authentication, this would be a much simpler process.
> > 
> > Craig
> > 
> Making backups is always good advice. It is also a good idea to use
> vipw and vigr to edit them. If you do not like using vi, you can set
> EDITOR to your preferred editor first. The reason to use vipw
> instead of using the editor directly is that it sets the locks so
> you only have one program changing the file at a time.
> 
> Thinking about it, it might be as easy to create a script that grabs
> the user name and password out of the passwd and shadow files, and
> feed it to useradd or adduser if they are only mail accounts. If the
> UID changes, it should not be a problem if you are using tar or
> rsync to move the mail files. (You need the correct options, and you
> have to run as root.) They can match on user name instead of UID.
> 
> If you need to preserve the UID and GID, you can grab that
> information also, and feed it to useradd. But if you do not to do
> it, this gives you a chance to "defragment" the UIDs and GIDs.
----
webmin <http://www.webmin.com> Users and Groups module has the ability
to import a list of users or groups from files but you do have to
combine the passwords from the old system's /etc/shadow into the old
system's /etc/passwd into one file before you can import into webmin.
The import format is very similar to /etc/passwd itself but on a RH
system, the second field is a * which represents the entry
in /etc/shadow whereas the import file would require that you substitute
the password where the asterisk is.

Craig


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