How do I migrate users to new Fedora installation?

[Craig White]

On Sat, 2007-09-22 at 10:03 -0700, Knute Johnson wrote:
> >Knute Johnson wrote:
> >> I've finally gotten F7 to run on my computer and now I want to 
> >> migrate my mailserver from the old computer running FC4 to the new 
> >> one.  How do I move my users passwords and mail to the new computer?  
> >> Is there a guide somewhere?  This must be a fairly common procedure.
> >> 
> >> Thanks,
> >> 
> >I am not sure about a guide - I never looked for one. One way to do
> >it is to grab the user section of passwd, shadow, group, and
> >gshadow. Then merge them into the corresponding files one the new
> >system using vipw and vigr. Then, depending on the setup, tar up the
> >mail spool, and untar it on the new system. Do the same with the
> >/home tree if necessary. If you are using SELinux, you will have to
> >relabel the files after moving them. You will want to update passwd
> >before untaring the files from the other system.
> >
> >This is not a complete description by any means, but hopefully it
> >will point you in the right direction, and others will jump in to
> >fill in the stuff I am forgetting!
> >
> >Mikkel
> 
> Mikkel:
> 
> Thanks very much.  I'm going to have to try this I think before I'm 
> really ready to migrate just to make sure I don't create a huge mess.
----
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