Maintaining Users Passwords Through an Upgrade

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On 12/10/2011 10:29 AM, johnc0102 at verizon.net wrote:
> I maintain a server with a number of users, and just recently upgraded to
> 
> Fedora 16 from Fedora 11. I did a clean install so all of the users now
> have
> 
> to reset their passwords. The question I have is: what is the preferred
> method
> 
> of managing user passwords so that their passwords will carry over to
> the new
> 
> installation? Should I set up a NIS server on the machine? Would that
> maintain
> 
> the passwords across the upgrades?
> 

  You could - or you could use LDAP (preferred but more complicated) or
the simplest is you could keep the user parts of

  /etc/password
       shadow
       group
       gshadow

 and edit them back into the fresh install files.