Migrating (moving) users from one fedora machine to another fedora machine

[zanzan]

Hello all u fedora fans out there!

Can anybody give some hints in how to successfully migrate user accounts from one fedora machine to another?
I did search on forums and such, but could not find any thread on this particular question ...

In my case I have a fedore core 2 machine with a number of users, which would have to be moved to the newly installed fedore core 4 machine.
Basically the most important data are the useraccounts with their passwords not to be lost, and the mails and the websites. Using openwebmail, /var/spool/mail as well as user created folders in home directories /home are to be transferred.

The steps I took so far :

1)
I copied /var/spool/mail and /home as well as /var/www/html for the sites.
that seemed to have gone ok.

I did this using rsync with the option to preserve owner and time

rsync -apogt root@ip:/home/ /home

same I did thing for the /var/spool/mail and /var/www/html

2) copied the /etc/shadow, shadow- gshadow and gshadow- to the new server.

Now is the question, what else is needed ?
because clearly, there is a problem:
ls -l command in home for instance, shows the ownership of the folders as numbers instead of usernames.
changing a password of a user -- passwd "user" I get the user does not exist.

I hope someone has a hint ...

thanks in advance

Zan

[baschti]

imho you also need the /etc/passwd file which includes the mapping between usernames and user id's

[zanzan]

thanks for ur answer !

meanwhile I DID find a similar thread .. errr ... typically after seaching for hours, you post a question, and then the next minute you accidentaly run into the answer ... oops sorry

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=329
I found there its needed to copy /etc/passwd and /etc/group as well ...

I will try it and post if this solved it all.

Zan

[Sarthan]

Don't forget /etc/group which contains the user-group-mappings.