Importing a foreign passwd file to FreeBSD

[Lowell Gilbert]

Paul Hoffman <phoffman at proper.com> writes:

> Hi again. I'm setting up a new FreeBSD system to replace an old NetBSD
> one. I want to import all the users and their passwords. As an
> experiment on a test box, I tried importing the master.passwd and
> passwd file from the NetBSD box, that FreeBSD won't let me log in; I
> always get "Login incorrect". Nothing is logged in /var/log/anything,
> so I don't know why the login attempts are failing. The users' home
> directories are created, and they're in proper groups.
> 
> Is this possible to do?

Sure.  I don't think there are any inter-platform issues, assuming
FreeBSD can handle whatever password format you were using on NetBSD.

I think you just forgot to build the password database.  See the man
pages for vipw(8) and pwd_mkdb(8).