[Q] migrate user ID/password to other server

[Ed Wilts]

On Tue, Mar 01, 2005 at 04:58:56PM -0500, Reuben D. Budiardja wrote:
> On Tuesday 01 March 2005 13:57, mcclnx mcc wrote:
> > We have several Redhat AS 2.1 and 3.0 servers.  Can
> > anyone tell me how to move user ID/password from one
> > server to another one?
> >
> > Thnaks.
> 
> /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow and /etc/group are the files that you need. "Normal" 
> user that you create usually have user id >= 500. So you may only want to 
> grep user id >= 500 rather than moving the whole files, which contains other 
> user that was created by the system (ie. apache, nobody, ...)

Also factor in gshadow and the smbpasswd files.  You may also watch for
the mail and cron files.

We ended up writing custom copy-user and paste-user shell scripts to
copy users from one system to another.  We run it and then rsync the
directories afterwards.  We also try to maintain group membership -
whether you want to do that or not is something you'll have to decide.

I don't know what happens if you're using ACLs...

-- 
Ed Wilts, RHCE
Mounds View, MN, USA
mailto:ewilts at ewilts.org
Member #1, Red Hat Community Ambassador Program