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

Wed Nov 29 13:43:02 UTC 2006
Walt Reed <wreed at vinq.com>

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