Originally posted by: SystemAdmin

I wish to copy the user accounts on one AIX node
to a second AIX node.

Can I do this by copying /etc/passwd and /etc/security/passwd from the source node to the destination node?

Is there anything else I need to consider?

Thank you for considering my question.

Originally posted by: ClusterBuster

You'll want to copy the following:

/etc/passwd
/etc/security/passwd
/etc/group
/etc/security/group
/etc/security/limits (if modified from default)
/etc/security/user (ditto)

tar these up and be careful about not changing file
permissions.

This has worked for me, but as they say, "your
mileage may vary". So perhaps someone else has
run into other files which are critical. You could
also search Google Groups comp.unix.aix for some more info.

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.unix.aix

• Jon

Originally posted by: SystemAdmin

You will also need to add the user directories or setup some type of automounting. If you have a large number of systems, you may want to start using LDAP authentication for a common repository of the AIX user information, especially if you are at AIX 5.2 or 5.3. As the previous reply stated, you may want to copy the other files, but make sure that the systems are already in sync. For example that you have the same group IDs on both systems. If you don't, then you will have to chmod all the affected files and this can be a nightmare. I guess that you know that the /etc/passwd file contains the users UID, Primary group ID, home directory and shell, while the /etc/security/passwd file has the actual encrypted passwd, and the /etc/security/user file contains the special user restrictions. The /etc/group file contains the group ID for each group as well as the members of those groups.

Originally posted by: SystemAdmin

Migrating Users from One AIX System to Another AIX System
http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=111&context=SWG10&q1=Migrating+Users+from+One+AIX+System+to+Another+AIX+System&uid=isg1pTechnote0367&loc=en_US&cs=utf-8&lang=en