Re: Moving from BSDi

["Jeremy C. Reed" <reed@wcug.wwu.edu>]

On Mon, 28 Oct 2002, Scott St. John wrote:

> I have several BSDi and FreeBSD servers here that are beyond repair and I 
> had planned to
> move them to Linux by now, but I am running into a few problems and wanted 

I have migrated from BSD/OS to Linux (and Linux to BSD/OS and *BSD) a few
times.

> First, does anyone know of a way to export the user accounts on BSDi and 
> import them into
> a Debian box?  I have close to 5,000 accounts I need to bring over.

Here is my script I used a couple years ago. (I don't advocate Linux over
BSD. I do advocate freedom of choice.)

#!/usr/bin/perl
$shadow_fname = 's';
$passwd_fname = 'p';
open (SHADOWFILE, $shadow_fname) | die ("Can't write to $shadow_fname\n");
open (PASSWDFILE, $passwd_fname) | die ("Can't write to $passwd_fname\n");
while ($line = <>) {
  ($name, $password, $uid, $gid, $class,
   $change, $expire, $gecos, $home_dir, $shell) = split (/:/, $line);
  print PASSWDFILE "$name:x:$uid:$gid:$gecos:$home_dir:$shell\n";
  print SHADOWFILE "$name:$password:11080:0:99999:-1:-1:-1:135481548\n";
}
close (PASSWDFILE);
close (SHADOWFILE);

Just pipe master.passwd into it. It will generate two files which you can
rename to shadow and passwd.

If you have widepasswords (which is not the default) in your BSD/OS
config, then I do not think you can easily move them over. I believe the
md5 is different.

> Second, of the ISP's on this list, what are you using Debian 
> for?  Everything?  DNS, Mail, web?

I have used Debian for X workstations, X servers, DNS, mail, spam
filtering, website hosting, radius, ldap, samba, printer servers, etc.

> I am running an ISP now and am seriously considering looking Debian to be 
> my new work
> horse after a sad display of performance of the above mentioned.

This is interesting. I can understand concerns with the commercial BSD/OS
(especially over past 1.5 years).

But what are the "performance" issues you have found?

Maybe you will have same performance issues with Linux (because they could
be same limits, same configs, or same bottle-necks).

(By the way, if you are already a BSD administrator, it is easy to move
from BSD/OS to NetBSD or FreeBSD).

  Jeremy C. Reed

http://www.isp-faq.com/