Comments on: Move or migrate user accounts from old Linux server to a new Linux server

By: Montaser Islam

Montaser Islam — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 11:59:08 +0000

cool post;
it save a lot of time man.

By: Paul

Paul — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 20:50:11 +0000

It worked perfect from FC 11 to FC 15. Btw, may I add the fact that the host keys must be imported/ecported also. Reason: it is possible to have some users which are using their accounts (SFTP) with the help of an automaitc SFTP client. IN order to keep everything transparent for them, the host keys of the machine must be imported/exported (etc/ssh).
Maybe is better to test it and include it in this tutorial. Btw, the a lot for doing this.

Have a nice weekend.

Paul

By: Frank Wang

Frank Wang — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 08:43:19 +0000

For the /etc/shadow file, better use following to prevent ambiguous match, say a local account named db will also match system account dbus
# awk -v LIMIT=$UGIDLIMIT -F: ‘($3>=LIMIT) && ($3!=65534) {print $1}’ /etc/passwd | sed -r -e ‘s/(.*)/^\1:/’ | egrep -f – /etc/shadow > /root/move/shadow.mig

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 18:07:25 +0000

This worked perfect for me migrating users from an old FC3 box to a new Ubuntu 10.04 LTS one. I did run into a problem when I tried to do it a second time. The instructions as they are will result in duplicate entries in the /etc/passwd file. If you want to do this more than once, the *.mig files will need some manual massaging before catting into the destination passwd file. (This may go without saying for most of you, but for me it wasn’t something I thought of ahead of time). I was able to clean it up, but it was a pain.

By: kaleeswari

kaleeswari — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 06:59:34 +0000

how to transfer the files from one root to another root user in same system using ubunto or fedora?

By: kaleeswari

kaleeswari — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 06:57:40 +0000

how to create the another root user and how to change the root ?

By: Manojg

Manojg — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 23:09:50 +0000

I created account successfully, can login but login take time and gives error:
/usr/bin/xauth: timeout in locking authority file /home/testuser/.Xauthority

Any help?

By: Irek

Irek — Fri, 13 May 2011 16:16:02 +0000

I tried to move account details from SUSE to Fedora/RH and password is not working :(
I

By: Tim

Tim — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 03:45:00 +0000

In Ubuntu, I had a problem following these instructions. When the screensaver was locked, you couldn’t unlock the screen without going to “Switch User” and then put in the password there. In addition, half of the time your gdm session would immediately crash and you’d have to log in from scratch again.

The problem was that the “shadow” user wasn’t able to read the /etc/shadow and /etc/gshadow files. The /etc/shadow and the /etc/gshadow files need to be chown’d to root:shadow, and chmod’d to 640 like this:

# chown root:shadow /etc/shadow
# chown root:shadow /etc/gshadow
# chmod 640 /etc/shadow /etc/gshadow

By: Ryan

Ryan — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 20:42:50 +0000

Everything worked great. All my users & machines show up in User Manager.

However I cannot logon as a user, only root. It says wrong password.

By: Embedded

Embedded — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 13:32:04 +0000

Thanks for a great guide.
I have small problem with it.

From some reason the tar commands don’t work under Red Hat Linux.
it did not manage to tar or untar the files.

Do you know how to skip existing files?
I tried -k flag but no success ;/

By: Lukas Johansson

Lukas Johansson — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 23:52:27 +0000

Thanks for this guide, managed to migrate a large webserver without any major problem thanks to you!

By: John Wood

John Wood — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 15:55:24 +0000

no, wait, I wasn’t looking in the current directory – I actually don’t get rid of the “-” file…

By: John Wood

John Wood — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 15:51:04 +0000

I was getting a “-” file created in /root/move when trying to get the shadow.mig, but I’m not now, and I’m not sure what I did!

If anyone does get the “-” file, add some spaces around the “tee” command and try again… That’s what I did and it went away!

By: Andy

Andy — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 20:00:53 +0000

If you use Samba shares; remember to grab /etc/samba/smb.conf, /etc/samba/smbusers, and /etc/samba/smbpasswd

By: mstone

mstone — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:24:35 +0000

Also check for aliases because a common multiple recipients solution uses that technique

By: Vivek Gite

Vivek Gite — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 14:49:02 +0000

@Juan,

Solaris uses the same files /etc/passwd and friends. So it should work with a little modification.

By: Juan Carlos

Juan Carlos — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 14:30:36 +0000

there is something similiar for Solaris ?

By: fidel

fidel — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 10:44:46 +0000

thanks for this small & easy how-to

Worked like a charme

By: roshan

roshan — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 10:30:31 +0000

your cp & awk command is so good