# Moving User Accounts



## kc2bxn (Apr 9, 2009)

Hi everyone!

OK simply I have a FreeBSD 5.4 install that I use for a SSH tunneling box the physical machine is a piece of crap (it was bought of eBay at the dawn of time) and I am trying to setup a new VM with 6.4.
So with a little research and some advice... "Just copy the user accounts files"  to the etc directory.
So I copied the master.passwd and passwd, group files over and restarted the machine and what do you know it didn't work.  x(

So anyone have any advice???

I know I didn't copy the user's home folders.
I figured we didn't need them because this machine is only used for tunneling in to our network.


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## kc2bxn (Apr 9, 2009)

I got it!!! I need to do some testing but I got it to work.

Move user entries from the following old files: 

/etc/passwd
/etc/group
/etc/master.passwd

Then run the following command to rebuild the password database: 

`pwd_mkdb -p /etc/master.passwd` 

A guy here at work gave me a hand .


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## kc2bxn (Apr 9, 2009)

Also thanks to this site http://www.afterschool.dk/documents/freebsd/freebsd-migrate-users/


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## anomie (Apr 9, 2009)

kc2bxn said:
			
		

> I know I didn't copy the user's home folders
> I figured we didn't need them because this machine is only used for tunneling in to our network



Glad you got the main issue solved. 

If you're referring to former shell users in that comment, you might want to change their home directory to, e.g., /nonexistent to avoid confusion for you and future sysadmins who review your work. 

(For that matter, if these are former shell users, you should take the time to clean up after them properly.)


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