Michael Kearey wrote:
Alexander Dalloz wrote:
Am Di, den 17.02.2004 schrieb Michael Kearey um 09:39:
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.
Why the change?
I can not confirm that it was a change as I never used uppercase
letters, but I can say it was ever a good idea to use just lowercase
letters and no special signs. For problems with Sendmail using uppercase
letters in usernames see
http://www.sendmail.org/faq/section4.html#4.17
I can confirm there was a change. Several redhat 8.0 boxes I have allow
hundreds of uppercase characters usernames. My Fedora box doesn't.
Therefore a change happened *somewhere*. Hence why I want to see a
changelog that anounces it...
I still cannot find a reference in any documentation that specifies the
valid characters for userID's. (Plain old Unix like usernames I mean).
I have to take the problem on the chin, I guess. The process of moving
users across and translating their usernames etc to all lower case is
the simple part. The big problem will be in comunicating the changed
usernames to hundreds of users...
I think this can be traced to RFC1274 and the fact that the LDAP COSINE
"userid" attribute (used in LDAP-based authentication) uses
"caseIgnoreStringSyntax" as the equality check--meaning that the
username is case-insensitive. Upper- and lower-case is insignificant,
"RiCk" is the same as "rICK" is the same as "RICK" is the same as
"rick", you get the idea. I suspect later versions of PAM and such
now essentially down-case everything.
That's just my opinion--I could be wrong.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer rstevens@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx -
- VitalStream, Inc. http://www.vitalstream.com -
- -
- On a scale of 1 to 10 I'd say... oh, somewhere in there. -
----------------------------------------------------------------------
