I added sn and home directory entries to those users then Archived/Restored again. Out of 5924 users 2 are missing.

Great info. I really appreciate the detail and accuracy you have put in your article.

I am migrating to 10.5 this summer and though I would love to archive and restore (same Xserve, IP and hostname) as I’ve done before, there are some issues with our OD being corrupt and after many attempts and discussions with Apple SE’s the solution is to go with a clean install and import users and groups (we’re losing pw’s but necessary to move forward)

Though I am very interested in you password migration steps. Have you encountered any repercussions so far?

Also, I have many servers to upgrade this summer. Would I be fine just doing a clean install on the OD master and upgrading the replicas and afp servers? I’m just not looking forward to all the settings I’ll have to redo if I’m doing a clean install on 20 servers.

thanks again

Apple is getting ready to release 10.5.3 soon; you may want to wait until then for your deployment, as it will fix yet another couple of hundred bugs in Leopard.

To answer your question: yes. The home directories should work just fine on the new server, with the user accounts intact, and if they are mounted/shared at the same location(s). There is no need to ‘tar’, but like all good sysadmins, I know that you will do a complete backup of all data before starting.

Have a good migration.

My configuration is similar to David’s, above. All the user home directories live on a second drive that will not be directly affected by the install of the new OS on the primary drive. Assuming that I properly export/import the account information from WGM, I’m thinking that there is no need to tar the user accounts. The drive and folders will be just as they were under 10.4 and should just work. Yes? No? Comments?

Thanks for the help.

I haven’t tested your scenario specifically, and I don’t have time at the moment to dig into the documentation (for what thats worth), so bear that in mind. I would suppose that the OD backup / restore is only going to work properly for you if your new machine has the same hostname and DNS settings as the old machine. By “work properly” I’m referring to Kerberos and everything associated with it. Kerberos is inherently tied to host/domain names, so effectively changing those names will break it.

In your case, a better strategy might be to name the new Xserve the same as the old one, then when you are ready to take it online, either take the old one offline or rename it. Or, set up the new server with a new name, and import the data by means other than OD Restore.

Supposing you went ahead with OD restore and everything went perfectly, if you use other Mac OS X services, such as mail and web, you would need to copy the data from those services over to the new server. Same goes for home directories.

I’m trying to distill the information posted here, but I think I’m a bit confused. Here is my scenario:

G4 MD 10.4Server (OD Master) hosting xServe RAID. New Xeon xServe to replace G4 MD as host and OD Master). Separate Replica to be deployed afterwards. About 100 very stubborn users.

Gist of the problem: Trying to move over the old OD to the new Xeon host. Xeon will have a new IP and DNS name, but the old DNS name will be added/appended/aliased to the current DNS A record kept by our Hospital. What, exactly, do I have to modify? If I follow the OD backup and restore method (easy way), what exactly needs to be modified, other than removing of certain user accounts (as recommended). Sorry for asking for the easy way out here….

For more information on tar, open a Terminal, and run ‘man tar’. Also run ‘tar —help’, which gives you all of the options for tar.

As an example, if I wanted to tar the /Users directory, I would run ‘tar cvf myarchivefile.tar /Users’. To untar that archive somewhere else, I’d run ‘tar xvf myarchivefile.tar’. tar takes other options as well, such as —exclude. In the blog post, my example excludes the Caches directories; I could add to that “.Trash*” to avoid copying files from user’s trashes.

Aside from tar, there are many other ways of copying files that preserve permissions and other attributes; rsync is another of my other favorites.

I would like more detailed information on the migration of home directories.
When you write about creating a Tar and etc.

I have an xserve with three drives: 80gb(running the os), 700(for the directories) and another 700 for backups(sparse).

I will also have a g5 dual 2gig running as a replica to my xserve.

thanks for all your help. looking forward to your response.