Use same profile at new server

[take2mir]

Hi everyone,
Server A at my place was totally crashed and at the moment, we cannot use it. So we decide to use server B as a backup plan while waiting for the server A to be fixed. My supervisor want me to copy .profile from server A to server B and then change the owner of the profile. He said, when you ftp from file from server A to server B, the permission will change to root. I do not understand what he means. Actually what should I do to make sure that users can access the server B without any problem as they access server A before? Thank you..

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

When you use ftp to copy a file, the file owner is that of the ftp user. A better way to preserve attributes is to use tar or cpio to backup all the .profiles and then ftp the tar or cpio file and extract the data on the target machine. That will preserve the original UID's, GID's, and modes of all the files tranferred. Note that I said UID's and GID's will be preserved; I did not say that owners and groups would be preserved. Those attributes will only be preserved if the passwd and group files are also moved to the new box.