CentOS - Nov 2006 - Copying user accounts (passwords) to another server

Hi Folks,

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.

Thanks

Nigel Kendrick

On Wed, Nov 29, 2006 at 01:31:48PM -0000, Nigel Kendrick
wrote:
> 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.
copy the relevant lines from /etc/passwd/, /etc/shadow, /etc/group, and
/etc/gshadow. (Actually, you can almost certainly ignore the last, but for
completeness.)

-- 
Matthew Miller           mattdm at mattdm.org         
<http://mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux      ------>             
<http://linux.bu.edu/>

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