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. -- - Kevan Benson - A-1 Networks