Hello,
I would suggest LDAP as NIS/NIS+ are slowly dying out in favour of LDAP. You can use something like FDS or OpenLDAP to accomplish this, PADL has some migration scripts for this to happen. The site, http://directory.fedora.redhat.com has some more information about this under the howto's especially the Posix one.
Cheers,
Aly.
On Thu, 1 Sep 2005, Bryan J. Smith wrote:
On Thu, 2005-09-01 at 15:06 -0700, Todd Cary wrote:
I have a new Centos installation that has an empty /home dir and there are no users...just root. I want to move the home directory from another server to the new one. At this time the old /home directory has been tarred with "-prf". That will keep permissions which could be a problem. Is there a simple way to move the /home directory? And the non-system users in the password and group files?
Yes, It's called NIS and NFS. It makes it extremely easy and painless.
It may seem like I'm suggesting more work, but once you do it once your network, you will never do it again. Even if you leave NIS and NFS disabled, once you set them up, you can always start the services.
With NIS, merely setup your current server as an NIS master. Reference the HOWTO (see TLDP.org). Now setup the new server as a slave. The maps get pushed and now you have a copy of all essential UNIX configuration files necessary (passwd, hosts, services, etc...). Merely cat >> the maps into the new server's files and make it the master.
With NFS, just export /home from the old server with "no_root_squash" for the new server IP, and mount it on the new one. Now you can move (mv) things directly over from one /home to another.