Rsync User Profiles?

Message

NiceGuy · Post by **NiceGuy** » Tue May 31, 2011 2:22 pm

Hi Community,

I have an Rsync question that I was hoping I could get some feedback on.

I have a gentoo server that goes through user profile creations regularly
, this includes the creation of new users, their home directory, password
etc.

I wanted to know if it was possible to sync the created users, home directories
and passwords to another server?

I'd do this perhaps through daily cron or such. At the moment, I literally have to
re-create the users manually on a second server which is not automated
enough for my liking.

Thanks for your time

your_WooDness · Post by **your_WooDness** » Wed Jun 01, 2011 9:38 am

Hey,

why creating users on the second server. You could use LDAP or NIS instead to distribute the users to other servers. Best would be to mount the /home directory via NFS on the second server, so the user homes are available.
If it's just a backup of /home and the users do not login on the second server you do not need to add the users on the second server. Just the mapping from UID and GID wouldn't give you the user name. Otherwise you would have to add the entries of /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow and /etc/groups of the first server to the second server.

WooD

d2_racing · Post by **d2_racing** » Wed Jun 01, 2011 11:46 am

Hi, you can sync your server to a remote location.

http://troy.jdmz.net/rsync/index.html

NiceGuy · Post by **NiceGuy** » Wed Jun 01, 2011 6:51 pm

Hi Everyone,

Thanks for the reply. Allow me to rephrase then,

If I wanted to create a backup of a linux user profile, what directories/files would
I need to copy for the backup?

I know each user has an entry in /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow so certainly those
would need to be included. Also each user has a home directory (/home/user), so
again certainly the home directory would need to be backup up.

Are there any more that I may not be thinking or aware of?

Thanks everyone