Maintaining Users Passwords Through an Upgrade

[johnc0102 at verizon.net]

On Saturday, December 10, 2011 10:37:05 AM Genes MailLists 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.

Sorry about the HTML in the original post. I was forced to use a different mail 
client that was I was unfamiliar with. Hopefully this is plain text.

I did save the password and shadow file, but it looks like the seed for the 
hash function changes through the upgrade. I admit that I didn't try using old 
files, though.