Fedora Server Migration

[rwagner]

In the past couple of years I have migrated, upgrade of equipment, the fedora servers. Everytime I have manually recreated users and instructed them to email themselves their email to the new server.

I know this is not the best way, but I am uncertain how to be sure I am migrating ALL of the users data, email, personal folders, etc.

If someone could point me to a URL that has these steps or provides the folders to capture this info.

Fedora 12 users + Sendmail is the key data to be migrated. I have already built the new server and I am ready to migrate the data.


All users are local users. None of them are ldap users, but if someone wants to point out a ldap solution I am willing to do this. This migration will be to remove the final windows system on the network. The network is small so ldap has never been a requirement, but it is growing and may be something to look at as the environment is now to the point where the next upgrade will be to add a 2nd fedora server to the network.

[rwagner]

No one on the forums knows how to migrate Users and Sendmail email boxes from one fedora 12 server to another fedora 12 server?

[nenad_86]

The place where sendmail stores its mail is /var/spool/mail
open up a terminal as normal user and type
cd /var/spool/mail
then to back it up
su -c 'tar cjfvp ~/mail.tar.bz2 *'
it will ask you for root password
to restore it on another machine
create all the users and extract
tar xjf mail.tar.bz2 -C /var/spool/mail

the files of interest if you want to backup users are
/etc/passwd
/etc/group
/etc/shadow

[rwagner]

Thank you for your help.

I used rsync instead of sftp to make it happen, but the folders were a HUGE help.