From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Ray Olszewski Subject: Re: preserving logins Date: Thu, 30 Jun 2005 19:40:48 -0700 Message-ID: <42C4AD30.8050000@comarre.com> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: Sender: linux-newbie-owner@vger.kernel.org List-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format="flowed" To: linux-newbie@vger.kernel.org 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. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-newbie" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.linux-learn.org/faqs