Mapping UIDS/GIDS between ext3 filesystems

[Aubrey Barnard <aubreys_key@xxxxxxxxx>]

All helpful gurus,

I am transitioning to a new install of Fedora on a personal computer. I
have two sets of partitions, one for a previous install and one for the
new install. Both partitions use ext3. What I would like to do is have
each user on the new install be able to access their files on the previous
install. I am planning just to put a symlink in their new home directories
which will point to their old home directories. I want to eventually phase
out the old home directories and reclaim the disk space used for the old
installation after the users have had time to copy relevant data and
adjust to the new installation.

This is all very straightforward, so what is the problem? The problem is
that I want to have a different (cleaner) set of UIDS/GIDS on the new
installation. Is there some way of mapping UIDS/GIDS between mounted
filesystems so that I can create the new users the way I want and they
will be able to seamlessly access the old files? I want to preserve the
old installation as is so I can boot it if need be. This eliminates the
option of changing all the permissions on the old system to match the new
UIDS/GIDS.

Do you have any suggestions for the future, if I want to do a similar
thing again? Would a different filesystem alleviate this problem or by
using ACLs instead of unix-style permissions?

I am considering copying all the user data on the old installation to the
new installation, but then I have the social problem of getting the users
to clean out old junk. Maybe a read-only subdirectory of their home
directory containing a copy of the old data would work? (This is
effectively what I am trying to do with creating a symlink to the old
data.)

I only have a handful of users to manage so the solution doesn't need to
be scalable to business proportions.

I understand this question might be more appropriately put on the fedora
lists, but the problem is essentially distribution-independent and this
list needs some traffic too.

Thanks a bundle!

Aubrey Barnard



 
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