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

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