Problem for OS Migration from Sun Solaris to Linux
 

Dear all,

I've a Sun solaris-8 server (sparc) which is working as a mail & database server of my network. Now, we need to migrate this server & its service to a new linux server.But,it is difficult for me to transfer users data & password file from Solaris to linux.

Would you please inform me that how can I transfer users data & password file from sun solaris to linux and which linux version will be preferable for this task.


With Thanks,

UnixBD

Why not migrating to Solaris 10 for x86 ?

Generally you should really only have to copy the user parts of the /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow, /etc/group files and you should be okay to login. The format is one of the few things I have never noticed any difference in across *nix flavors.

Then just copy over the home directories (or mount them) and you should be good to go, user wise.

Don't copy the whole /etc/whatever files though, just copy over the parts for your users. Different *nix versions have different system users and groups and you don't really want to muck these up to much.

Keep in mind I have only done this linux to linux, but I don't know why it wouldn't work from sun to linux. Worth a shot anyway, as long as you back up the old ones.

FYI, if this breaks your ability to login, just go into the grub menu and do an "e" to edit your boot parameters and add "single" to the end. Then if you boot off that modified version you will go into single user mode, which bypasses the broken /etc/passwd file. Then after you restore the old /etc/passwd (etc) files you just reboot, the modified grub settings won't save through to the next boot.