hi all!

my school has got a baaad debian woody server and they decided to upgrade. The have a good comp for that reason but the IT staff can't do it. There is one serious problem that I can't solve either. There are over 300 users on this server and I must have them. I mean their data and emails and such must not be lost.
How can I copy all that data to a new installation? Eg: debian 4.0. Let's say that they userd maildir on the old machine and I use the same thing on the new machine.
Do I need to do it manually or shall I write a script that will do the job for me or what shall I do? It is not a problem to access the comp on the lan.
There is one more thing. In order to keep everything organized the home dirs of the users are grouped into separate folders according to the first letter of their username. Eg: my username is vargadani and my home dir is /home/v/vargadani

Thanx in advance

where are the maildirs kept? Are the two servers exactly the same (i.e. daemons running with same permissions/folder structure/daemons running with same userids)?

If everything is under /home, from / execute:

tar -czf homebackup.tar.gz home (be very careful about the order)

move homebackup.tar.gz to new server, place in /, tar -xzf homebackup.tar.gz, everything on the new server should be exactly the same as on the old server for this to work properly.

Or, if you have samba running, a cp -R /mnt/smbshare/home /home or something of the like.

What about the users? Can I just copy and paste the /etc/group /etc/shadow /etc/passwd files?
What about the MySQL databases? I am guessing, the easiest way for that is if u export the entire database (Gonna take some time... Prob. hours) and then import it, right?