Migrating a FC5 server to Ubuntu

[Felipe Figueiredo]

On Wed 20 Feb 2008 11:55:37 A. Rick Anderson wrote:
> I am building a new Ubuntu machine.  Over the years, my FC5 machine has 
> just become non-maintainable, so I'd like to migrate my existing user 
> accounts, email etc from my FC5 machine to Ubuntu.  

Since you don't mention the problems you faced, it's hard to guarantee you 
won't face them again.

> My primary fat email client is Mozilla.  For some reason, on the FC5 
> machinem, Thunderbird can't find the existing accounts, so it won't 
> migrate them (part of why I want to just bag the old machine and start 
> over).  I would like to figure out how to migrate these mail accounts to 
> the new server.

I  don't really understand what you mean, but may I assume you are talking 
about local accounts, and not virtual users defined in some sql db?

Do they access emails on POP, IMAP, direct shell access? 

Do you store mail in mbox format or Maildir? Do you intend to change that?

> What is the best way to migrate these user accounts over?

How about just batch recreate all the accounts? You can extract the passwords 
from /etc/shadow into a file in format login:passhash (one per line) and use 
chpasswd to batch reset them, so the process should be fairly transparent to 
the users.

I did this when migrating from slackware to debian.

> I've got a High Point 133 FakeRaid card, and 2 250 GByte drives 
> available, but based on what I am hearing, I don't see any point in 
> using the High Point card, but should just use the software RAID in Ubuntu.

From fake to fake, I suspect mdadm has a larger userbase, which almost always 
favor bug reporting/fixing. Maybe it has some performance benefit over mdadm, 
but I hardly think it would be noticeable. YMMV.

regards
FF