Ray Leventhal wrote:
Is there a way to 'automatically' recreate users/permissions when moving
from RH8 (yes, I know...way old) to CentOS5.1 or is it just simpler to
recreate the users manually?
Merge your RH8 copies of /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow into the CentOS
ones, preferring the new versions of existing users where possible. Be
sure not to duplicate user IDs. Basically, it should be possible to
copy everything with user ID over 500 directly. UID 500 will be the
first user the CentOS firstboot routine makes you add, which you'll
probably want to remove so you can copy the old UID 500 over. Anything
under 500 should probably be left alone on the new box, but you may need
to merge some under-500's from the old box that don't have a counterpart
on the new one.
Then, you can use a Unix-aware archiving tool like tar or cpio to pack
up the user files on the RH8 box. When you unpack it on the CentOS
side, it will see that these users are declared in /etc/passwd and
restore the old permissions and ownership info. You should study the
tar or cpio man pages to understand the options you will need to pass to
make this happen; I'm not certain that it's automatic in all cases.
If you will have network connectivity between the boxes, you might not
even have to make an extra copy of the files. Something like this might
work:
# find /home | cpio -pud | nc newbox ....
then on the other box, you catch the CPIO stream with another copy of nc
and spit it out to the filesystem with something like cpio -icvBud ...
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