This is not a "Which is better, Red Hat or Debian?" question, but a very specific question about a distro migration of one specific box. I've done a lot of research on this, and have found no answers particular enough to my situation.
The box in question is still running RH 5.2 (with all security patches, of course), and has had a very active user base of about 175 shell accounts since it went online in October of 1998. It has had very impressive uptime and performance records. However, it's been a rather large headache to keep current, given Red Hat's bugginess and lack of an update tool. [I know that RH 7.0 has an update agent, and I thought for about two seconds about upgrading this box to 7.0 just for that tool. But I tested that tool, and it is absolutely _horrible_; it's nothing like as easy/reliable/effective as apt-get, and RH 7.0 is much buggier than my box currently is anyway.] Now, to the migration: I'm actually migrating the whole system to a different machine, so I don't have the problem of having to change the distros on the same machine on the fly. In fact, I've already got the new box up and running with an up-to-date Debian potato; it's just waiting for the users. Most of the user migration is therefore very easy. Just tar up the $HOME directories and /var/spool/mail, and copy them to the new box, etc.. My main issue is getting user accounts over. It would be very easy to copy the lines from my passwd, shadow, and group files over to the potato box, but I'm concerned about the fact that RH begins uids with 500, while Debian begins with 1000. If I copied accounts directly from passwd file to passwd file, I'd end up with a bunch of Debian users with uids between 500 and 700. I've already tested this with several user accounts, and it seemed to work fine; I'm just worried about things breaking down the road. My questions, then, are these: is there anything about this situation that will make Debian break? Are there debianized packages that rely on having normal (i.e., non-system user) uids above 1000? Is there anything else about the migration of users that I need to be worried about? I want this to be a very smooth transition that takes place at 3am some night; ideally, the less attentive users won't even know that the change has taken place. Thanks, Belloc __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Shopping - Thousands of Stores. Millions of Products. http://shopping.yahoo.com/
