On Fri, Oct 02, 2009 at 06:45:12AM +0700, Olivier Nicole wrote: > Hi, > > > What is the best way of migrating users from one machine (FreeBSD > > 6.3) to a new machine (FreeBSD 7.2)? > > > I need to migrate their user account settings (shell, password, > > expiry etc) and also their data that they have in their directories. > > Basically: > > - you need to vipw on both machine and copy the user accounts from the > old machine to the new machine, that is fast;
Or copy /etc/passwd from the old machine to the new one, and run pwd_mkdb, which is essentially what vipw does anyway. And don't forget to sync your groups file as well! Dan > > - you need to copy the home directories of your users from one machine > to the other, that can take long time if you have a lot of users > with a lot of data. > > To be sure that there is no change being made by the users while you > are copying the data/accounts, you must disable any login during the > copy process. > > You can practice copying the accounts while the machines are online > (login enabled); but be certain to do a final copy with the machine > offline (login disabled). > > If copying data would take too long time and you cannot afford to put > the system offline for such a long period, you could install rsync on > both machines. > > - keep machines online and rsync the users data from the old machine > to the new one. > > - repeat rsyncing indefinitely, this will continue copying file that > has changed. > > - put the machine offline and do a last rsync: that one should not > take too long as it will only copy what has changed since the very > last run of rsync. > > > Another way regarding the users' data, if they reside on a separate > hard disk, you can simply physically mount that hard disk in the new > machine. > > Best regards, > > Olivier > _______________________________________________ > freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list > http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions > To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org" -- Daniel Bye _ ASCII ribbon campaign ( ) - against HTML, vCards and X - proprietary attachments in e-mail / \
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