SUMMARY: Maximum length account name

From: Leonard, Roger (rleonard@cvty.com)
Date: Fri Jul 16 1999 - 07:23:58 CDT


I wrote:

>is there a max length for the account name in solaris2.6? I know admintool
>only allows 8 characters, but I am able to use vipw and put in more. Does
>anyone know of any issues with using more than 8? any help is appreciated.

SUMMARY:

The consensus from lots of people was that standard unix convention is 8
character account names. Anything more than that is inviting problems and
Sun won't certify it. Things like NIS+, ps, ls, useradd, log files, utmp and
wtmp would have problems otherwise. Also there may be problems with
changing passwords as well as other apps like Tivoli's Maestro and COPS also
may assume 8 character names and alert or otherwise fail. One respondee
stated that:

"According to a Sun CE, starting with Sol 2.6 Sun has tighten-up their code
to meet an RFC which specifies that UNIX user and group names should be
8 characters or less and should not contain things like underscores or
periods."

However I heard from some folks who said not to worry, they use >8 character
names all the time. I would love to hear Suns official stand on this. In
these days of firstname.lastname email addresses it would seem that the
limit should be jacked up a bit. Well, I guess I will follow the
conventional thinking and limit it to 8. Thanks to all who responded.

Roger D. Leonard
Roger D. Leonard
Unix Systems Engineer
HealthAmerica, Pgh PA
rleonard@cvty.com



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