Perl – Migrating User Accounts From Old To New Linux Distribution

Migrating user accounts can be very troublesome when you have a large numbers of users. So, is always recommended to deploy active directory or LDAP to have a centralized authentication system.

If your organization don’t have AD or LDAP and have large portion of users needed to transfer from 1 to another server. Don’t worry, instead of manually key in all the records 1-by-1, there’s always a faster way to achieve this kind of process by using script.

I have written 2 Perl scripts to perform the migration.

• Perl - Migrate user account script (109) (run in old server) – migrate user accounts from old server and generate a library with all the captured user data.
  • Sample library – Perl - Sample User Library (94)
• Perl - Setup User Account (176) (run in new server) – include the library generated by migrate_passwd.pl and add all the user_account to the new server.

Steps:

1)  Download migrate_passwd.pl in the old server and run it

./migrate_passwd.pl /etc/passwd /tmp/accounts.pm

2)  Then copy the /tmp/accounts.pm to the new server (put this file into the same directory of serversetup.pl)

3) Download serversetup.pl in the new server and run it

./serversetup.pl

4) Done

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