Subject: Re: username limits

From: [email-masked] (Charles Hedrick)
Date: 18 May 94 02:47:29 GMT

[email-masked] (Robert Rowland) writes:

>I thought that one of the changes in Solaris 2.3 was the allowance of
>user names exceeding 8 characters.  I created using the adduser scripts
>training1 - training12.  When I telnet to system and log into training12
>I get the user "training".  All the files passwd,shadow,oshadow have the
>correct entries, but login doesnot differentiate after 8 chars.  Is this
>a problem or did I misunderstand something ?

This is part of SVr4's "Extended Fundamental Types".  They also
include 32-bit uids and gids.  Sun seems to have decided not to
support EFT for the moment.  That's a problem with large universities,
since we need 32-bit uids.  

In fact the data structures for EFT are present.  If you edit
/etc/passwd and /etc/shadow by hand, you can use long names.  The libc
routines that read from the files all handle the long names.  However
a lot of system software still expects a maximum of 8-char names, so
you'll find that the names get truncated in a number of places.  We
use the Gnu file utilities and our own login, so this isn't a problem
for us.  It appears that for us long usernames would work.  But we're
not sure whether we want to do this.

32-bit uids are important enough that we may be willing to do it on
our own if we have to.  Like long file names, all the necessary data
structures are present.  In fact the kernel and most utilities can
handle 32-bit uids.  However there are explicit tests in the kernel in
about a dozen places that detect uid's > around 60,000 and return
errors.  If you patch these tests out, things mostly work.  Our latest
major RFP requires vendors to commit to support for EFT, so we'll see
what Sun does.  The basic capabilities are all there in Solaris.  It
wouldn't be a big deal to make it work.  I would guess that they need
to see a few more customers listing it as a requirement.  There are
competitors that support it.