SUMMARY: Long usernames

On Mon, Jun 18, 2001 at 05:29:28PM +0200, Martin kesson mumbled:
> 
> * Is there support for usernames longer then 8 characters in Solaris 2.6
>   and greater?  (It would seem it is supported by passwd, how about the os?)
> * What are the most obvius problems with this?  I know things like last & 
>   utmp/wtmp might break.
> 
> How about nfs? ftpd?  Perhaps I will need a new ftp daemon for this to
> work.

As I had expected most told me it would work but there still are things
that will break.  Scripts that depend on output from various commands
might break when they get usernames longer than 8 characters.  Various
commands might even become targets of bufferoverflows which is indeed a
bad thing.  To remedy this one would have to audit and recompile each
and every command that uses usernames, a daunting task needless to say.

Solaris 8 seems to be very well prepared for long usernames although it
does not officially support it.

NFS doesn't care ofcourse, it uses your uid and not your username.

So, to make a summary of my summary:
Sun does not make any claims that long usernames work and thus it is not
supported.  It will however work in most cases but you should be aware
that using it might break things and cause downtime/extra work.

Thanks to the following:
Mark Neill
Casper Dik
Darren Dunham
John Leadeham
Johan Hartzenberg
Vern Walls
hmnguyen@verizongni.com
Angel L. Mateo


//Martin