Re: preserving logins

[Ray Olszewski <ray@comarre.com>]

Karthik Vishwanath wrote:
> Since there are fair number of other users than myself on this machine, I
> want to keep the same /home partition, under either system. Is it possible
> for me to use the same passwd/shadow files on either system, and expect
> compatibility (if so, which are the files to be copied) or must I ask
> every old user to re-create their passwds? (I can do that, if its the
> easiesr route, which is a relative measure!)
[...]

This is a difficult question to give you a definitive answer to.

If RH and Debian use compatible password encryption, you can simply tuck 
the RH /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow files someplace safe, then do the 
Debian install, letting it creates its own, new /etc/passwd and 
/etc/shadow files. Then you just cut and paste the user-level entries 
(the ones about 1000, if RH follows the same numbering convention that 
Debian does) from your tucked-away RH files into the corresponding 
Debian files.

But I didn't even notice what version of RH you said you were using, so 
I don't know if the encryption mechanisms will match.

As someone else already explained, you really do want to let Debian 
create the system accounts for you. Conventions on these accounts drift 
a bit over time, and I would have no real confidence that an unknown 
version of RH and any current version of Debian use perfectly matching 
conventions.



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