Marco Gonçalves

FreeBSD migrating user accounts

Marco

Quick and dirty way to migrate user accounts from one FreeBSD box to another. From the source box you will only need two files:

/etc/master.passwd
/etc/group

copy them to the target box, but DON’T overwrite (yet) the existing files there. Put them in /root/master.passwd and /root/group. Compare the copied files with the existing ones for new system users that may exist. If there are any new users/groups add them to the copied files.

Then move /root/group to /etc/group and run this magical command

pwd_mkdb -p /root/master.passwd

It will install in /etc/master.passd and recreate all the needed files (/etc/pwd.db, /etc/spwd.db and /etc/passwd).

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