Thanks to all who responded.
I got interesting replies here. Some have doubts about unix supporting
usernames > 8 chars.
Others have the same problem and waiting for a solution.
______________________________
An interesting workaround , I haven't try it yet came from Claudio
Tantignone <C_Tantignone_at_sondaarg.com.ar>
His reply comes here :
Some time ago in version 4.x I edited adduser and modified were it creates
the user and adds more ? symbols where it check for 8 chars. You can find it
because it checks ???????*, you can use like 15 ? and the adduser check
until that value.
That works fine for me but I was not using C2 security. You can try the
workarround.
______________________________
Nice explanation about the problem came from "William H. Magill"
<magill_at_isc.upenn.edu>
His reply comes here :
I believe that the answer is "don't hold your breath."
As I recall, the Username length is defined in the POSIX standard or the
SVID suite, and until the standard is changed, anybody who exceeds 8
characters is no longer "POSIX Compliant."
The real problem is that the 8 character userid is very imbeded in the
"bowels" of Unix, and any attempt to change it will result in many many
unexpected things breaking -- mostly all of it all kinds of "free software"
that everybody depends upon. And especially today with everybody very
concerned about buffer overflows, the old trick of simply allowing the
length to float (like was done with the password for so many years) is not
longer a "safe" computing practice. Typical things that will break...
anything using the userid for authentication -- pop, imap, sendmail,
ssh, immediately come to mind. Anything that displays information on
"system users" (all are basically fixed format) = finger, w etc.
Anything that depends upon that fixed format report to find out "who's
logged on" -- wtmp, talk, etc.
Your only option that I know of is to run OpenVMS where userids can be
up to 32 (or is it 64) characters.
______________________________
"Riggs, Joan" <JRiggs_at_kls.usaka.smdc.army.mil> asked the same question
before and he attached a summary
His reply comes here:
I don't think you can have usernames > 8 characters - but you CAN
have longer UIDs/GIDs though by turning on extended UID support
and you can have outrageously long passwords, not sure of the limit there.
______________________________
"Dr. Tom Blinn" <tpb_at_doctor.zk3.dec.com> mentioned about some future
releases may have this feature.
His reply comes here :
There is definitely NO SUPPORT for this in V4.0E, which by the way is,
as I recall, no longer a supported release (you should probably be in
the planning stages for moving to V4.0G, which will be supported for a
long time into the future).
REAL support for "long user names" (up to 32 characters is planned, I
believe) is currently in the plan for V5.1A (unless the name changes),
the next release after V5.1 (which is just shipping now). My best guess
for the delivery of this next release is early next spring, maybe as
early as February 2001 but more likely March. Since the release is in
planning stages now, and not all the work is fully planned yet, I can't
give you a much better guess than that. (We hope to be in "field test"
or what most people would call "beta" by the end of this year.)
This is NOT yet a committed feature for the release, there are LOTS of
things that will need to be tested with "long user names" before there
will be a statement of support, and if problems are found really late
in the release and there is not sufficient time to complete the work
to have things function correctly (and that might include making sure
key open software, like Apache, works correctly), full support might
be deferred to a later release (maybe next summer).
------------------------------
Thanks
Hisham
Received on Thu Sep 21 2000 - 07:48:25 NZST