Migrating a FC5 server to Ubuntu

A. Rick Anderson a_rick at hughes.net
Thu Feb 21 16:00:15 UTC 2008


Felipe Figueiredo wrote:

>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.
>  
>
More and more application depending on out of date libraries and the 
update function no longer able to keep up.  I have tried to upgrade to 
FC6/FC7 and the standard installers won't do it.  All I really care 
about is preserving is my personal emails that are stored in Mozilla 
1.7.  For some reason, when I tried to upgrade to Thunderbird, it can't 
see the Mozilla accounts, so obviously, it's installed somewhere 
Thunderbird doesn't expect to find it.

>>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?
>  
>
Standard Linux user accounts

>Do they access emails on POP, IMAP, direct shell access? 
>  
>
I'm using the ISP's email server and have configured my Mozilla client 
to pull every ten minutes.

>Do you store mail in mbox format or Maildir? Do you intend to change that?
>  
>
Not sure what format Mozilla uses.  What I'd like to do is migrate my 
account and mail to a current Thunderbird installation.

>  
>
>>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 assume that you mean I can use whatever text tools I need to do the 
extraction (vi?) and formatting and that the utility chpasswd can read 
these text files and set the passwords on the new machines to be what 
they were before?  I'll RTFM chpasswd and do that.  I'
I'm using Samba as a PDC.  Is there something similar for moving the 
Samba authentication stuff over?

>  
>
>>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.
>  
>
Unless strongly indicated otherwise, I'm planning on just using IDE 
controllers on the motherboard, rather then installing the HighPoint and 
have yet another probable point of contention.

Tx for your comments!




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