Moving existing users from one Linux server to...

xmdms · 03-04-2004, 01:48 PM

another Linux server with indentical settings. I built another Linux server 2.1AS with identical settings (different hostname) for redundancy and practice. I would like to save sometime by moving all the users and groups over to the new server. Would this be possible without a backup software or any kind? If yes, what are some of the steps that I need to take to proceed? Any ideas??

Thank you in advance.

homey · 03-04-2004, 02:12 PM

Sure, just copy these over to the new box...

/etc/passwd
/etc/shadow
/etc/group
/home/*

xmdms · 03-04-2004, 02:54 PM

Thanks for the quick response. Would you know if I can FTP these files over, would these files permission stay the same?

Again, thanks!!

homey · 03-04-2004, 03:24 PM

I don't know what ftp would do to the permissions.

xmdms · 03-04-2004, 03:46 PM

Just thought I asked....

Thank you!!

xmdms · 03-04-2004, 03:54 PM

Another question;
What if my my "root" account doesn't have the same UID & GID for both boxes and I am trying to copy from one to the other? Will this going to mess up my plan?
Homey - What would you do if you need to put in place a "warm" spare incase of downtime on the production server? I don't want to have to reinvent the wheel so to speak and minimum down-time if all possible.

I am interested in your feedback.

Thanks,
xmdms

homey · 03-04-2004, 04:15 PM

Well now that you ask,

I would make an image of your up and running system. I do that anyway for a surefire backup, but if you want to clone this system to another box, it is very easy to grab that image and install it to the new box.

Partimage works very nicely for this as it only copies the used areas of the disk as apposed to dd which copies everything ( used or not ). In other words partimage is much faster.

Also, I copy the partition table with sfdisk which makes it very handy to copy that file onto another hard drive.

jschiwal · 03-04-2004, 05:41 PM

The user 'root' always has the uid=000.