Q: suggestions for a live move of user dirs

From: Ian 'Ivo' Veach <ivo_at_scs.unr.edu>
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 1999 12:03:31 -0700 (PDT)

Greetings gurus -

We are going to be changing our whole home directory structure from one
scenario to another, and would like to do it live if possible. We've
got a clustered home area on two 4.0D servers running C2. One idea
we had was (in a nutshell):

for each user in /etc/passwd
        if (user) logged in
                make a note and come back to them after they've logged
                        out
        else
                "lock user out"
                mv their home dir to the new structure (time stamps
                        are of no concern).
                replace their home dir with a symbolic link to their
                        home in the new structure (so /etc/passwd
                        still works)
                let user back on
then, replace the old passwd with the new passwd (reflecting the new
structure home dirs). finally we can remove the old structure

My questions are 1) has anyone else done this sort of thing live and what
methods did you use, 2) with the aforementioned structure, does anybody
have a good method of "locking the user out"? I hate to have the overhead
of 80000 calls to tcb to lock the user (then unlock), or 80000 changes to
/etc/passwd (changing their shell and then back), 3) general pointers I
missed?


cheers and thanks,
______________________________________________________________________________
Ian Veach, postmaster/webmaster/sysadmin UCCSN System Computing Services
ivo_at_nevada.edu, http://www.nevada.edu/~ivo 775.784.6486, fax: 775.784.1108
______________________________________________________________________________
Received on Fri Jul 30 1999 - 19:05:38 NZST

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