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Message-ID: <20021114235954.GA16895@openwall.com>
Date: Fri, 15 Nov 2002 02:59:54 +0300
From: Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com>
To: owl-users@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: long username (more than 8 chars)
On Wed, Nov 13, 2002 at 02:28:59PM +0300, allen@...sics.msuiit.edu.ph wrote:
>
> I have just migrated our our server to Owl. In our previous server,
> there's a user that insisted on having an account name beyond 8 chars
> long. I went OK. With Owl now, I can't force it to accept a username of 9
> chars long.
>
> The main problem would then be the e-mails of this user. The initial
> solution I'm thinking is to create an account 8 chars long and make an
> alias.
Yes, this is the preferred way to do it.
> But I would prefer if Owl will allow me to create account names
> more than 8 chars long. Is this possible?
Currently, the check for valid usernames is hard-coded into user
management utilities. It's in shadow-4.0.0-owl-check_names.diff.
You may patch it and rebuild shadow-utils, at your own risk.
The reason for this length check is that we know not all software
reasonably works with usernames longer than 8 characters. While our
core packages, including PAM, tcb, and the shadow suite, are free from
this limitation, some others have minor problems with longer usernames
(the output format of commands such as "last" assumes this limit).
Some other packages have a username length limit that is greater than
8, but still a limit that we'd need to check against (or patch it).
Vixie Cron, for example, has it at 20. Also, we don't want people to
run into problems with third-party software.
I think we should consider making this check optional.
--
/sd
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