Troubleshooting authentication issues
 

I have a CentOS 5.6 server whose users I need to migrate over to a newly setup server running CentOS 6.2. I followed the instructions outlined here:

http://www.ghacks.net/2010/02/10/mig...ne-to-another/

But I am unable to login with users I copied over, I get an Authentication failure error.

Any idea's why that would be or what I can do to troubleshoot it?

Thanks

Ghacks may advertise itself as "one of the largest independent tech sites on today's Internet" but those instructions:
- don't explain UGIDLIMIT (see UID_MIN in /etc/login.defs),
- the tar command doesn't take into account SELinux contexts (tar: "--selinux"), extended attributes (tar: "--xattrs"), ACLs (tar: "--acls") and sparse files and
- copies /home contents indiscriminately (some daemons run as unprivileged user and you might not want to copy that),
- it copies the complete mail spool (including root and any system user spools: could have used "--exclude" or "--exclude-from")
- it doesn't copy the at and cron spool nor any local settings in /etc like /etc/security or /etc/{at,cron}.{allow,deny} settings, and
- it doesn't tell you about and doesn't check for check UID and GID duplication.
*** More importantly it doesn't tell you to back up files on your target server first.


The first admin reflex should be to check the log files as they often hold clues. Based on that you 'pwck -qr', 'grpck -r', 'restorecon -vv -nri /home' etc, etc or whatever the clues tell you to.