Guys - we have a Linux RHEL4 server that basically runs 2 things. Samba and Apache. The main job of this machine is to dish out files as a file server via Samba to Windows clients. Its a fairly simple server however it is old and we now have a nice new Dell server ready to do the same task. Now I plan to install RHEL4 on this machine in a similar partition scheme as the current FS however now I have no clue what the correct process is for importing everyones user account that is listed in /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow.

Right now the SMB.conf file authenticates everyone's access from LDAP so nobody really ever needs to know their password as long as they are logged into their machine via the LDAP server. It just uses their local machine authentication on the domain.

How do you guys recommend I copy over all 300 user accounts? I don't know if I copy over the /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow files, will that generate their /home/user directories or is there some magic trick? I know I have seen this done before, I just wish I had taken notes as I don't recall.

Thanks for any info!

The following article is a little dated, but it sounds like it would still apply to your situation.

How do I migrate user accounts from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1 to version 3 or 4?