How to migrate user accounts from Compaq/hp Tru64 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux?

Solution Verified - Updated -

Environment

  • Compaq/hp Tru64 Unix in "Trusted" mode
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

Issue

Need to migrate user accounts from Compaq/hp Tru64 server in "trusted" mode to a RHEL server.

Resolution

Run edauth -g to extract user names and password hashes, then set those hashes as is in /etc/shadow on RHEL.

  1. extract user accounts from Tru64:
    # edauth -g | grep u_pwd= | cut -d: "-f1,4" | sed 's/u_pwd=//g' > tru64-accounts
  2. copy the tru64-accounts file to the RHEL server
  3. inspect the tru64-accounts file manually to remove system accounts and accounts which should not be migrated
  4. create accounts in batch:
# cat tru64-accounts | (while read X
do
USERNAME=`echo $X | cut -d: -f1`
PASSWORD=`echo $X | cut -d: -f2`
echo Creating account for user $USERNAME..
useradd -m -p "$PASSWORD" $USERNAME
done)

Root Cause

Compaq/hp Tru64 Unix uses Bigcrypt to hash user passwords. This is a modified two-part crypt hash which allows for passwords longer than 8 characters in length on legacy Unix systems.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux implementation of Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM) does support Bigcrypt hashes, hence the transparent migration.

  • Component
  • pam

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