n00b mess: Moving users without messing up E-mail from 10.5 box to 10.6 box

Gentleones,

I have a 10.6 Xserve and a 10.5 PowerMac G5 DP from which I have migrated all of my users and their E-mail. Or so I thought.

While I did indeed successfully move the mail from the old machine to the new one, when I installed 10.6 on the new box, I chose to import users to the new machine. What it did and what I thought it would do are two different things.

What I thought it would do is move the users from the old machine to the new one, creating a new “LDAPv3/192.168.1.4” directory.

What it did is merely point the new machine at the old one so that they both have to be on. My new machine, 192.168.1.4, has a directory named “LDAPv3/192.168.1.3” and, yes, if I turn 192.168.1.3 off, 192.168.1.4 can’t do jack. Users can’t get E-mail, etc. Authentication fails all the way ’round, ‘cept for the admin user in the Local directory, of course.

So what I’d like to do is move my users from the old machine to the new one, but I certainly don’t want to do it in such a way that Dovecot loses track of whose mail is what and that their E-mail is lost.

I have contemplated the problem a bit and think that:

1 – Manually creating the accounts (small number of them, so not too hard) would likely destroy the linkage to the E-mail. I would think that creating a new user of the same name in a LDAPv3/127.0.0.1 directory would have different whatever-it-is that Dovecot uses to link up the E-mail.

2 – “Backup and import” (as suggested by a dialog box, but which I can’t figure out how to do anyway… there IS no “Backup” command that I’m aware of) might work but, as the previous parenthetical suggests, I can’t figure out how to do it anyway.

3 – “Export” and “Import” might work, except that when I tried to do that the first time I did the 10.6 install (I’ve done test installations several times over the past few weeks) made a mess of things and there was an Address Book error that kept popping up in the logs to which nobody has found a solution.

Sigh.

Help?

Thanks,
Bill
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Bill Eccles • www.bill.eccles.net • Tolland, CT

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