Migrating a FC5 server to Ubuntu

[Felipe Figueiredo]

Rick, I think we should start this over, from a more basic stage.

Is this a desktop machine, or server? How many accounts are we talking about 
here?

On Thu 21 Feb 2008 13:00:15 A. Rick Anderson wrote:
> Felipe Figueiredo wrote:

[snip]

> 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.

This surprises me, considering both apps are similar and come from the same 
group. I would think there should be an import tool in thunderbird, but since 
I don't use it, I don't know any specifics.

Anyway, I'm sure the mail folders are mbox files somewhere in your ~/.mozilla/ 
dir.

> >>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

How many? You just gave me the impression this is a desktop machine, which I 
would expect to have just a few accounts. 

Anyway, see below for a hint on how you can do it automatically.


> >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.

So, there are no servers running on the machine, just static user data? If so, 
seems like the easiest case of backup-install-restore.

> >>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.  

Well, better yet, you can get them all by a simple grep/awk combo.

Something like:

sudo awk -F: '{print $1 ":" $2}' /etc/shadow > output

Then edit 'output' and erase all the lines corresponding to system accounts 
(including root). Leave only the users' accounts. Your new system might have 
different system accounts.

Then you can batch create the accounts and 'sudo chpasswd < output' to reset 
the passwords to their original values.

> I'm using Samba as a PDC.  Is there something similar for moving the 
> Samba authentication stuff over?

Sorry, I have close to zero information on Samba. Shame on me.

regards
FF