Wow...that was a blast from the past. Not much seems to have changed in 5 years. In $JOB-4, back in 2004, my colleagues and I had to migrate a bucketload of network home directories from one storage array to another.

All the staff used Eudora for their email. And the boss wanted the server transition to be seamless.

I had to figure out how to do all the above from a shell script - including saving the inode information from the all the old pref files and updating the pref files on the new server with the correct information. Note that those strings needing to be updated after derez'ing are also Pascal-style strings...not so simple to manipulate in a shell script.

IIRC there were about 80 different homedirs involved - many having prefs located in different and/or bizarre filesystem locations. It eventually all got done with only a few tears, but the war story won me a decent prize at Macworld 2005 :-)