Moving passwd file

[Mike Kapsak]

Hi,

I have a requirement to move the passwd file from one server to another only taking those user-id's accessed within the last 90 days. Can anybody point me in the right direction without getting overwhelmed?

Thanks,

Mike Kapsak

[Ashwani Kashyap]

IF you are on a nontrusted system then copu your /etc/passwd file as /etc/passwd.old .

Then write a script using the command lastb to find out which users logged in during the past 90 days , remove entries for all other users in the passwd.old file , then copy this file onto your new server as /etc/passwd .

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

Hi Mike,

Try this way.

1. Run last -R > /tmp/success
2. "vi /tmp/success" and delete the entries that are more than 90 days old. Determine the
90 days old date (say Jun 23), search for it by using " :.,$d " in the vi session and save
the file.
3. Do "awk '{print $1}' /tmp/success |sort |uniq > /tmp/logins". Delete wtmp, root and other system logins from the list.
4. Now get the entries using

for i in `cat /tmp/logins`
do
grep ^$i /etc/passwd >> /tmp/passwd.delta
done

5. passwd.delta contains only user logins. Copy this to the other system and "append" it to the /etc/passwd file.

Things will be little bit complicated if you are using trusted systems.

-Sri

[Sridhar Bhaskarla · Accepted solution]

Hi Mike,

Try this way.

1. Run last -R > /tmp/success
2. "vi /tmp/success" and delete the entries that are more than 90 days old. Determine the
90 days old date (say Jun 23), search for it by using " :.,$d " in the vi session and save
the file.
3. Do "awk '{print $1}' /tmp/success |sort |uniq > /tmp/logins". Delete wtmp, root and other system logins from the list.
4. Now get the entries using

for i in `cat /tmp/logins`
do
grep ^$i /etc/passwd >> /tmp/passwd.delta
done

5. passwd.delta contains only user logins. Copy this to the other system and "append" it to the /etc/passwd file.

Things will be little bit complicated if you are using trusted systems.

-Sri

PS: By the way, I do not know the scope of "overwhelming". We only try to help each other here.

[Tom Maloy]

Well, I wouldn't move the password file - too much likelihood of conflicting user IDs.

If you want to see which users have had $HOME directory contents that have been changed in the last 90 days, assuming that they are all in /home:

find /home/* -mtime -90 -prune -print | cut -d"/" -f1 | sort -u

That might miss a few folks who didn't change any files. So you could try:

for i in `cut -f1 -d":" /etc/passwd`
do
last $i | head -1
done

You'd have to add something, probably using caljd.sh, to figure out the date. Or just redirect into a file and edit the list by hand.

Tom

[Mike Kapsak]

Thanks everyone for your help. BTW, the system I will move the passwd file to is not in use and therefore I don't have to worry about what already exists. I will try the recommendations and go from there.

[Jim Walls]

If these user's require login access , then, unless you intend importing the users' $HOME data from the original server, you will need to create a home directory for each user... and, as a minimum, copy the contents of /etc/skel to each.

Alternatively, you might want to set up one new user on the second system, to be used as a skeleton for the rest. Copy the contents of the skeleton user's virginal $HOME to each of the imported user's home directories.

Regards
Jim