[CentOS] Managing users and passwords

[Todd Cary]

Kevin -

When the time comes, I may need help in creating the command that 
excludes the entries in owner, group, password and shadow tables 
for "system" entries.

Todd

On 3/24/2011 5:17 AM, Kevin Thorpe wrote:
> On 24/03/2011 03:45, Todd Cary wrote:
>> I plan to make my current Centos 4 HD a slave and install Centos
>> 5.5 on a new HD (master).  Then comes the challenge of of moving
>> all of my /home/"user" data to the new master.  I have some
>> preliminary questions:
>>
>> Is this a good strategy for installing Centos 5.5: keep the
>> Centos 4 on a slave disk?
>>
>> Will the Centos 5.5 detect the slave disk (Centos 4)?
>>
>> Is there a way to move the users, groups and passwords from one
>> disk to the new Centos 5.5?
>>
>> IT departments must have servers go down or want to install a new
>> version of Linux and have the same challenges.
> Starting with a new disk and making the old one a slave is a very good idea.
> That's exactly what I'd do in your situation. Even better if you mount the
> partitions on the slave as read-only then you know you have a fall-back
> position.
>
> Start with your new install and get all the packages installed that you
> need.
> Now, assuming you aren't using anything clever for user logins you can
> splice
> the users part of /etc/passwd /etc/shadow and /etc/group on to the system
> parts of the new install. Don't overwrite the systems stuff as they may have
> changed between versions. Then copy over /home using rsync or similar - if
> you had this as a separate drive like I do then simply re-mount it. Make
> sure
> the user and group permissions look right - if you spliced passwd  and group
> properly then they'll be fine. Lastly you need to go through the servers
> and
> services you need running and sort out the /etc directory entries for them.
> Don't be tempted to just copy the old files over - it works most of the time
> but you'll get bitten if the format of the file has changed.
>
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