From: Scott Adderson (EMP) (Scott.Adderson@eml.ericsson.se)
Date: Fri Mar 28 2003 - 04:47:00 EST
OK, some informative and also amusing responses :-), confirming our thoughts on this. Although we've done some testing with numeric usernames on their system and not seen any problems so far, we are recommending our customer stick to convention to avoid any future potential problems.
With thanks to Jack Gallagher, Rita Workman, Thierry Itty, Ed, Corne Beerse, Steve Illgen, Tom Myers and David Lodge.
The consensus was although it's possible to force and may be OK in some cases, it's not how the system was designed to work and could have an unpredictable outcome.
I've included David's response as it summarises quite nicely.
Thanks!
Scott
-----Original Message-----
From: Lodge, David [mailto:David.Lodge@capitalone.com]
Sent: 27 March 2003 17:03
To: Scott Adderson (EMP)
Subject: RE: [HPADM] User names question
BAD BAD BAD BAD BAD BAD
This will cause *real* problems! (Though HP-UX will let you do it!)
As to why. On Unix a 'username' is just a human readable alias to a userid. The userid is all important - it is everything - it *is* the user.
Now a user id is a 32-bit integer.
Now ask mention the above two facts to the 'non-unix' manager and watch to see whether the bright glow of comprehension dawns over him.
If not; apply a swift LART and explain about the ambiguities with having the userid and username in the same format. It will work with *most* programs if the userid is the same as the username.
Now; if the username is *different* from the uid, there will be difficulties in recognising whether the parameter is a username or userid.
Even if the userid and the username are equal, there are still problems that may be caused:
* if your user number schema allows somebody with the id of 000000 - some applications will think its a '0' - ie root
* if your user number schema allows user id's starting with '0' - be careful as the 0's may be dropped and the id will be assumed to be a userid
* A *lot* of badly programmed applications still follow the old SVR4 rule of 'no user id above 60000'
So in answer: Get your manager to change his PC account names :-)
dave
-----Original Message-----
From: Scott Adderson (EMP) [mailto:Scott.Adderson@eml.ericsson.se]
Sent: 27 March 2003 12:06
To: 'hpux-admin@dutchworks.nl'
Subject: [HPADM] User names question
Hi Admins,
I have a question about non-standard user names, both for HP-UX and Solaris. What we're being asked for is invalid according to any information I've seen but one of the managers is pushing it so we'd like to come up with a good reason why it would be a bad idea or not:
Some of our users have numeric user names for their PC accounts. Their non-Unix manager wants to change the Unix usernames to match, e.g. 12345678. Currently we have the format xx345678. We're saying it's a bad idea but he's saying it looks like it'll work so why not?
Any experiences or strong reasons for/against much appreciated!
TIA, I will summarise.
Scott
---------------------------------------------
Scott Adderson
Senior Engineer, Unix & CAD Support
Ericsson Global IS/IT.
scott.adderson@eml.ericsson.se <mailto:scott.adderson@eml.ericsson.se>
--
---> Please post QUESTIONS and SUMMARIES only!! <---
To subscribe/unsubscribe to this list, contact majordomo@dutchworks.nl
Name: hpux-admin@dutchworks.nl Owner: owner-hpux-admin@dutchworks.nl
Archives: ftp.dutchworks.nl:/pub/digests/hpux-admin (FTP, browse only)
http://www.dutchworks.nl/htbin/hpsysadmin (Web, browse & search)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.7 : Sat Apr 12 2008 - 11:02:28 EDT