Maintaining Users Passwords Through an Upgrade

[mike cloaked]

On Sat, Dec 10, 2011 at 3:37 PM, Genes MailLists <lists at sapience.com> wrote:
> 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.

I guess if there are only a few machines involved with the same small
set of users then copying back the relevant sections of the files
mentioned is relatively painless - but if the user base grows and
there are many more machines it would become desirable to move to a
central user auth system - like LDAP - in the past I have tried to
look through the documentation with a view to implementing an LDAP
scheme - such as 389 Directory Server - but I found that documentation
was (for me) rather difficult to digest to a stage where I could
easily get started - I wonder if anyone knows a good source of online
advice to offer a "starter" guide to implementing 389? Would be really
useful.
-- 
mike c