[CentOS] Moving the Home dir to new server

[Arun K. Khan]

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.

How big is this file?  -z would have also compressed it.  Alternately,
see below.

> Is there a simple way to move the /home directory?  And the non-system 
> users in the password and group files?

     1. sort and extract the non-system users/groups from the
        respective /etc files passwd/shadow/group.  scp the delta files
        to new system and append them to the respective files there.
     2. scp/rsync /home/ (from old system) to /home (new system) see man
        scp/rsync.  Note options for compression and sym links.
     3. Ensure file/dir ownership at /home.  If need be use "chown -R
        <userid>:  on <userid>/"

The above is off the cuff :)

HTH,
-- Arun Khan (knura at yahoo dot com) 
If you're going to do something tonight that you'll be sorry for
tomorrow morning, sleep late. -- Henny Youngman