Moving users

[Ian Killer_1]

I have a machine that is a crucial support tool for network service availability. I need an outage on it for maint, but users may need it. The tool they use can be moved to another system temporarily but this system doesn't have their accounts. Can I export/import users accounts from one box to another? Perhaps I could move the secure users db/tcb files? These systems are running in trusted mode.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

[Cheryl Griffin]

Ian,
You would also need to copy /etc/passwd as well as $HOME/* to get the user specific files.

Cheryl

[Paula J Frazer-Campbell]

Ian

Quick and dirty:-

1. Move the tool.
2. Create one user on the other machine.
3. All users use this single account.


This is dependant upon what they are doing.

Paula

[Cheryl Griffin]

A couple other files needed:
/etc/group /etc/logingroup

Cheryl

[Ceesjan van Hattum]

A thought might be to introduce automounter.
You can put /home within automounter and all homedirs are available on the machines you like and don't have to move the data itself.
Ofcourse the /etc/passwd, /etc/group can be maintained within NIS (better not use NIS+).

But ofcourse, it also very much depends on the kind of machines (i.e. availability/importance) and on the amount of time you have for implementation.

Just a thought...
Regards,Ceesjan

[Ian Killer_1]

THanks Cheryl and Paula J. F-C....
I just can't guarantee that all the users can be notified being a global user base, and spread througout many network support teams. It also becomes a major security risk distributing a single user and password for world wide network configs.

I think I'll create the single user passwd deal but leave it in the hands of the on-call support guy.

Thanks again.

Ian D.F. K.

[Ian Killer_1]

Thanks everyone. Fabulous help as ususal.

Nope. I don't have the time for all that implementation but I might use this case to drive something of the sort at a later stage.

Ian

[Nick Wickens · Accepted solution]

Remember that if you do this by copying the /tcb, /etc/passwd, /etc/group and home directories to an other server you may have file access problems if you don't synchronise the UIDS and GROUPIDS across the the machines. Ie if you already have a user on the temp machine with a UID of 201 and you copy a passwd file over where UID 201 is allocated to a different userid then the second user will have access to the other users files.

I had this issue for service guard reasons because I don't use NIS so did an exercise to make sure UIDS and GROUPIDS were unique across the two systems.