From owner-freebsd-hackers Thu Jun 20 11:19:33 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id LAA28714 for hackers-outgoing; Thu, 20 Jun 1996 11:19:33 -0700 (PDT) Received: from misery.sdf.com (misery.sdf.com [204.244.210.241]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id LAA28705 for ; Thu, 20 Jun 1996 11:19:26 -0700 (PDT) Received: from localhost (tom@localhost) by misery.sdf.com (8.7.5/8.6.12) with SMTP id LAA00634; Thu, 20 Jun 1996 11:26:54 -0700 (PDT) Date: Thu, 20 Jun 1996 11:26:52 -0700 (PDT) From: Tom Samplonius To: Michael Smith cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Longer usernames? In-Reply-To: <199606200713.QAA05653@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk On Thu, 20 Jun 1996, Michael Smith wrote: > Tom Samplonius stands accused of saying: > > > > What is the general consensus on usernames longer than 8 chars? I've > > been doing some testing on a -stable system with 16 character usernames, > > and everything seems to work ok. > > NIS won't. Really? NIS supports databases of arbitrary key-data pairs. Keys can be longer than 8 characters. On FreeBSD systems, long usernames in /var/yp/master.passwd propogate to slaves just fine, and if the NIS clients have been built to handle longer usernames, those users can login too. > > Also, I recently noticed that BSDI 2.1 supports 16 character usernames > > too (UT_NAMESIZE is 16). This means that BSDI 2.1 bins that access wtmp, > > utmp, etc will not work under FreeBSD. > > What do they do about NIS? Truncate the usernames? Bad bad bad. BSDI 2.1 doesn't have NIS. If it did, I would suppose that it would handle it the same way as FreeBSD does. > > Tom > > -- > ]] Mike Smith, Software Engineer msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au [[ > ]] Genesis Software genesis@atrad.adelaide.edu.au [[ > ]] High-speed data acquisition and (GSM mobile) 0411-222-496 [[ > ]] realtime instrument control (ph/fax) +61-8-267-3039 [[ > ]] Collector of old Unix hardware. "Where are your PEZ?" The Tick [[ > Tom