On Wed, Nov 29, 2006 at 12:46:13PM -0800, Kevan Benson said: > On Wednesday 29 November 2006 05:43, Walt Reed wrote: > > 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 > > It's worth noting that if you use external packages (rpmforge, kbsingh), that > some packages may create users without a set UID (as the core packages seem > to have), and if already installed on the new system, it might be using a > different UID. In these cases, you should either copy regular user portions > of the files only, or take a careful look at a diff between the old and new > files to ensure there are no problems. > > This caused me a few minutes of confusion with clamav/clamd (specifically the > milter socket) which had an incorrect owner after passwd sync on a mail > server migration. Ya, that is annoying. When building the "replacement" server, it can help to sync / add accounts before all the third-party crap goes on. We do it as part of the kickstart %post scripts. Kickstart from pxe-boot is awesome - especially on HP servers... :-) Once a machine is installed in the rack and powered up for the first time, it's online and usable with all the packages we need, preconfigured, in about 15 minutes.