[olug] Upgrading/Changing Distros

[Trent Melcher]

Personally, I have never upgraded to from one distro to another,
however all you should need to save are the passwd,group,shadow file in
/etc/ and copy them over once you load a new distro.  However some
distros might put extra canned users into their passwd files during
install, so you might want to cut and paste your user into the existing
passwd file after the load.  You will also have to do this for the group
and shadow file.  Also doing this you will have to manually put the
users directories back out there and reset their ownerships.

All this is easy to do, but could be time consuming with allot of users.

Trent

-----Original Message-----
From: olug-bounces at olug.org [mailto:olug-bounces at olug.org] On Behalf Of
William E. Kempf
Sent: Thursday, March 27, 2003 9:02 AM
To: olug at olug.org
Subject: [olug] Upgrading/Changing Distros

OK, I've got a RedHat 7.0 box that I'd like to upgrade.  In addition,
I'd
prefer to move it to Mandrake as well (9.1 specifically).  This box has
around 25 users and is a production server.  I know that my Mandrake 9.0
box easily upgraded to 9.1 with out destroying any user/group settings
or
data (of course, I backed up just to be sure).  Can anyone tell me if an
"upgrade" which switches distros should fare as well?  If not, is it
possible to move the user and group definitions, retaining passwords,
etc?
 What files would need to be saved to do this?

-- 
William E. Kempf


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