[CentOS] Re: Copying user accounts (passwords) to another server

[MrKiwi]

Walt Reed wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 29, 2006 at 12:46:13PM -0800, Kevan Benson said:
>> On Wednesday 29 November 2006 05:43, Walt Reed wrote:
>>> On Wed, Nov 29, 2006 at 01:31:48PM -0000, Nigel Kendrick said:
>>>> I am doing a server swap out tomorrow and wondered if there was a utility
>>>> that will copy user account details and their current passwords from one
>>>> server to another (both CentOS 4) - there's only about 15 to do so it's
>>>> not a major issue.
>>> Rsync and scp are your friend.
>>>
>>> You can either cut and paste the user info from the /etc/passwd, shadow,
>>> and group files manually, or copy the entire files which wiill also copy
>>> over all the system accounts (root password and such):
>>>
>>> cd /etc
>>> scp -p passwd shadow group newserver:/etc
>>>
>>> Then of course you will probably need to copy the user home directories
>>> over:
>>>
>>> cd /home
>>> rsync -aze ssh * newserver:/home
>> It's worth noting that if you use external packages (rpmforge, kbsingh), that 
>> some packages may create users without a set UID (as the core packages seem 
>> to have), and if already installed on the new system, it might be using a 
>> different UID.  In these cases, you should either copy regular user portions 
>> of the files only, or take a careful look at a diff between the old and new 
>> files to ensure there are no problems.
>>
>> This caused me a few minutes of confusion with clamav/clamd (specifically the 
>> milter socket) which had an incorrect owner after passwd sync on a mail 
>> server migration.
> 
> Ya, that is annoying.
> 
> When building the "replacement" server, it can help to sync / add
> accounts before all the third-party crap goes on. We do it as part of
> the kickstart %post scripts. Kickstart from pxe-boot is awesome -
> especially on HP servers... :-) Once a machine is installed in the rack
> and powered up for the first time, it's online and usable with all the
> packages we need, preconfigured, in about 15 minutes.
> 
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Walt - Can you show us your scripts?

I am working on something similar - a way to deploy a server 
using kickstart and then a handwritten script to configure 
things like postfix, ip, iptables, mysql, apache etc

I imagine however that all you clever people have already 
got this in your toolbox of tricks,.

Thanks,

MrKiwi