Migrating Network Homes from 10.4.9 Server to a New 10.4.9 Server

[skeleton_key]

Hi:

I am getting ready to replace an aging Xserve G4 running MOSXS 10.4.9 with a new Intel Xserve running MOSXS 10.4.9. Open Directory on the Xserve G4 contains about 100 user accounts that use Network Home Directories hosted on an AFP volume on the same server. Can anyone recommend the best way to move the users, including all network home directories, from the old server to the new one?

I’ve used a variation of the procedure in the article, “Migrating LDAP Users and Passwords to a Clean 10.4 Server” to rebuild a 10.4 server while preserving user accounts + passwords and it worked well. I can use that same method here, but I’m wondering if there is a better method. Is there a best practice for migrating OD user + computer accounts, including Network Home Directories, from one MOSXS to another?

Thanks,

Oliver

[mcmaddog]

I just got finished a little over a week ago doing this and it’s not a difficult process.

While the Admin PDF from Apple says that you shouldn’t use archive and restore for a migration, an Apple engineer told me it was fine and is the easiest way to preserve the user’s current passwords. In Server Admin select Open Directory and then click the Archive button. From here you can select a location to archive your Open Directory database as a sparseimage which will require a password for encrypting/decrypting (DO NOT FORGET THE PASSWORD). You can save this to an external HD or merely start the old server in Target disk mode and access it after seting up your new server.

When setting up the new server put the basic information in during the Server Setup assistant walkthrough, but don’t configure any services yet or have them automatically start yet. After it restarts make sure DNS is configured and forward and reverse DNS lookup is working before going any further.

Once the new server is setup with forward and reverse DNS is working, merely go back to the Archive screen in Open Directory and locate where the sparseimage file is for restore and it will automatically promote your machine to OD Master and import your users. It’s important that the Kerberos Realm is identical to your old machine, but we actually used our old G4 Xserve as the OD Master so the IP and host name were different and didn’t cause any problems. NOTE: our AFP server was setup on the new Intel Xserve (which is also an OD Replica) and used the same host name as the old server so we didn’t have to change anything in Workgroup Manager under the Home tab for any users.

Another good tip is if you plan to have all the same services running on the new server you can go to each service in Server Admin and click the settings button. In the lower corner you will see a little box just above the save button. Click and drag this to the desktop and it will save a plist file that you can drop onto the settings window on the new server to automatically reconfigure the service. You should also do this before making any extensive changes to services in case things don’t work after.

Our Home directories are on a Xserve RAID so I didn’t have to migrate the data, but assuming yours are on your boot volume and not on a separate partition/drive I would recommend using the command line utility ‘ditto’ (because it preserves ownership/permissions) to copy the data to an external HD (with it set to preserve ownership) or again put the old server in Target disk mode and then copy them to the identical location on the new server. Practice with ditto on a client computer so you get a feel for how to use it before moving your home folders. If your home folders live on their own partition/volume use Disk Utility and make an image of it and then restore them to the new server (this method preserves the most file information, but can take a while if you choose to make the image compressed.)

[skeleton_key]

Thanks for the advice! I’ll let you know how things go when I migrate the server next week. For this migration, I’ll keep the path to the home directories the same on the new server as it was on the old, though obviously it is on different hardware. For future reference, is there a good way to change the paths to a large number of home directories at once, e.g. change a portion of the path for all users at once? Can I archive OD and do some sort of find/replace, or are there LDAP tools that will let me recurse through the database and substitute portions of the home directory path?

[mcmaddog]

It’s really easy in Workgroup Manager to change the path, all you need to do is move/create the new share point and make it network mountable for home folders, and then copy the existing Home folders into it. The new share point will appear under the ‘Home’ tab in Workgroup Manager. Now merely (shift/command) select as many users as you want (probably all of them except your directory admin account), click the new share point under ‘Home’ and click save. They will all have the new path to their individual home folders.

I work at a school and inheirited separate share points for Administration and Faculty as well as every grade of students, so we include that information in the comments field in I think the ‘Advanced’ tab so that we can do fast selections of the different groups and make universal changes for different groups all at once.

[skeleton_key]

Thanks for the great advice, everyone. The server migration went flawlessly with all network home directories working as expected.

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