Walt Reed wrote: > 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. > > _______________________________________________ > CentOS mailing list > CentOS at centos.org > http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos > Walt - Can you show us your scripts? I am working on something similar - a way to deploy a server using kickstart and then a handwritten script to configure things like postfix, ip, iptables, mysql, apache etc I imagine however that all you clever people have already got this in your toolbox of tricks,. Thanks, MrKiwi