Michael Kearey wrote:
Hi There,
I have several multi-user machines running Redhat 8.0. There are hundreds of usernames on these machines that have mixture of upper and lowercase.
I may be able to just upgrade, but I would prefer to install new Fedora, and automate adding the existing users on old Redhat 8.0 machines to new Fedora ones.. (Several reasons for doing this, but not relevent here)
saving the old /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow files will keep your user names/passwords as they are, and keeping the /home without reformatting it will keep the users data.
After doing the install to FC1, simply put the saved copies of the passwd and shadow files back and your users will be back as they are now on the older RH 8.0 system.
I have since discovered that Fedora (And Redhat of course) at some stage changed , or maybe more properly, now enforces usernames to allow only lowercase.
AFAIK the only character that was historicaly REQUIRED to be lowercase was the first one. (having the user name with the first character in uppercase had some strange effects.)
I'd like to know precise details :
Why the change?
Any simple way to circumvent the 'feature' (I know vipw allows you to do it, but I need an automated way !!)
Is there a changelog anywhere in appropriate rpms that explain the change?
Any other advice and info would be much appreciated.
If you are needing to translate the mixed case user names to all lower case a simple perl script can do that for you very easily. It would need to work on /etc/passwd and on /etc/shadow to do the translation.
Also, since the home directories are likely named the same as the present usernames, you may want to change those as well. Again, perl is your friend for that.
