Usernames > 16 characters

tim tim at meer.net
Tue Aug 12 20:12:20 PDT 2003



Matthew Dillon wrote:

:Any chance Dragonfly will handle usernames > 16 characters?  Or is this 
:something that many people feel should be done with something like PAM?
:

    Well, you have to ask yourself "larger then 16 characters for what
    purpose" ?  If for email purposes then the appropriate avenue is to
    create mail aliases, for example.  An account name as an operating 
    system tracked entity should not have an unbounded size, otherwise 
    it becomes too ungainly to administer and report on (in logs and so 
    forth).

    That said, it is obvious that 8 was too small and so it was bumped up
    to 16.  The question is would it be reasonable to bump it up to, say,
    32?  I can't imagine making it larger then 32 but I can see some valid
    arguments to going from 16 to 32 and perhaps bumping up the hostname
    field in utmp.h at the same time.
I think bumping both values would make sense.   I remember punting on a 
migration from IRIX to BSD 3.X because of the 8 character username specs.

I can see a need for both to be larger.  I can't see the username be > 
32.

Are you referring to UT_HOSTSIZE ?  That should probably be 32 also.

Also, should MAXLOGNAME either be specific tied to UT_NAMESIZE?  Or is 
there a POSIX reason for the seperation?

tim






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