Copy all users between systems

[mattibjork at bredband.net]

Hello Matthew,


On 10/29/2010 04:51 PM, Matthew Seaman wrote:
> On 29/10/2010 12:46, Laszlo Nagy wrote:
>> I would like to copy all user accounts, including root from an already
>> installed 8.0 system to a fresh new 8.1 system.
>>
>> My plan is to boot into single user mode, then copy these:
>>
>> /etc/passwd
>> /etc/master.passwd
>> /etc/group
>>
>> then run pwd_mkdb and finally restart the system. (Obviously, I also
>> need to copy user home directories)
>>
>> Will this be enough? Did I miss something?
>
> That should be sufficient, assuming you aren't using NIS or LDAP or some
> other userdb.
>
> AFAIR there weren't any changes to the standard system accounts between
> 8.0 and 8.1, but in general you should also run 'mergemaster -p' to
> merge in any such when copying the master.passwd file between different
> OS versions.  (mergemaster -p does some other stuff besides merging the
> system user accounts, but it's all pretty harmless)
>
> Restarting the system may not actually be necessary, but it's a good
> idea if you can spare the down-time.


Its never bad to be careful but shouldn't it be enough to change init mode?


> 	Cheers,
>
> 	Matthew
>


//Mattias