Alper AYKUT via FreeIPA-users wrote:
Hello I have 5 servers. The users of all servers are created
locally.
All users have Home. Now I will connect the Servers to the Free ipa
server to enable them to log in with the Users I have created in Free
IPA. However, how will the users' home folders that were created in the
past match the User created in Free ipa? Or will the users need to
delete their home folders to be created again.
If I need to delete the Home folders of the users, I will need to back
up the data of all users. This is a huge workload.
Let me restate the problem.
You have 5 servers with local users on them with their own uid/gid. I
assume its even possible that a user on server A has a different uid/gid
than system B-E, right?
Now you want to introduce IPA to manage users and the IPA users have
different uid/gid from the local users on the various servers and you
want to preserve their data.
If that is correct then you'll need to find all files owned by the local
uid and/or gid and chown/chgrp them to the IPA equivalent.
The find command can be helpful to identify all affected files using the
-uid or -gid option. The -exec option can be used to call chown or chgrp
to update the ownership.
I'd recommend searching from root (/) and not just /home in order to
catch files in various tmp directories or other hidden-away locations.
Depending on how many users you're talking about, particularly if there
is a mixed bag between systems, this is going to take a while either way.
Note that this centralization is one of the benefits that IPA brings.
It's just painful to move to from a distributed setup. It should be a
one-time pain though.
rob