Migrating user accounts from linux to freebsd

[Konrad Heuer]

On Thu, 8 Apr 2004, Brian Sheehan wrote:

> I've recently done a fresh installation of freebsd 4.9, and now I want
> to migrate the user accounts from a redhat 9 machine to the new freebsd
> machine, and hopefully keep logins and passwords unchanged. Is this
> possible?

It is possible, but you need to write a shell or perl script to combine
the user entries in the Linux files /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow to one
file having the FreeBSD /etc/master.passwd format. Then you will have to
append your file to /etc/master.passwd an to run pwd_mkdb to build the
data bases.

> Also, what would be the best way to go about moving the users' home
> directories from the linux box to the freebsd one?

I would NFS export the home directories on the Linux box and mount them on
your FreeBSD system. Then you can copy all the files with tar:

tar cCf /path/to/nfs/mount - . | tar xvpCf /path/to/new/home/dirs -

Best regards

Konrad Heuer (kheuer2 at gwdg.de)  ____            ___  _______
GWDG                           / __/______ ___ / _ )/ __/ _ \
Am Fassberg                   / _// __/ -_) -_) _  |\ \/ // /
37077 Goettingen             /_/ /_/  \__/\__/____/___/____/
Germany