Re: What is the maximal length of usernames on Solaris?

From: Josh McKee (jtmckee_at_rm-bogus-ac.net)
Date: 12/28/03 

Date: Sun, 28 Dec 2003 16:45:54 GMT

On Sun, 28 Dec 2003 16:27:03 -0000,
Richard.L.Hamilton@mindwarp.smart.net (Richard L. Hamilton) wrote:

>In article <che9svgfd2dnfn8spaqekh0knb8fcen47c@4ax.com>,
> Josh McKee <jtmckee@rm-bogus-ac.net> writes:
>> On Mon, 24 Nov 2003 13:19:22 +0000, Gregory <ccsqihg@herts.ac.uk>
>> wrote:
>>
>>>On Sun, 23 Nov 2003, Josh McKee wrote:
>>>
>>>> "Why are you calling them lusers?"
>>>
>>>This newsgroup is called comp.sys.sun.ADMIN
>>>
>>>In the same way that ambulence crews call drowning victims
>>>"floaters", unix admins call average users "lusers". It is
>>>standard on the job humor and is what helps keep us sane.
>>
>> That's fine. Did you happen to catch the original message where I
>> asked him why he did it? He didn't answer with "because it's sysadmin
>> humor".
>>
>>>As far as I am aware the general consensus amongst unix
>>>admins is that the standard 8 character limit for usernames
>>>is reasonable - I certainly see no reason to increase it.
>>
>> That's the problem. You've determined that it's reasonable while the
>> users apparently want longer user ID's. You're not listening to your
>> users. You've just made the determination that eight characters is it
>> instead of maybe thinking that it should be increased. While I
>> understand that this limitation has been an integral part of UNIX for
>> quite sometime and as such would be difficult to change I don't think
>> that this is a reason not to try and change it.
>>
>> I don't know how many times I've been preaching the merits of UNIX to
>> Windows users only to find that they want to use user ID's longer than
>> eight characters. Recently I was trying to convince a friend of mine
>> who owns his own company to use Linux with OpenOffice. I setup a test
>> system for him to try out. When I went to create his user account I
>> learned that his user ID was going to be ten characters (first initial
>> and last name). He asked me why it had to be limited to eight
>> characters when it wasn't a problem on Windows. People notice these
>> things. While this one particular issue was not the cause of his
>> failure to adopt Linux it was a combination of little things like this
>> that were. No matter what the technical merits of the platform he
>> didn't feel like the system was working for him like Windows did. He
>> liked using his first initial and full last name. And he didn't
>> understand the reason for the limitation because Windows didn't have
>> it.
>
>Well, then tell him the choice comes down to breaking apps every version
>so you can add new features (like long user names), or saving the money
>for updating all the apps and spending it on his bonus.

The choice was not to use UNIX but instead to use Windows. Thus the
reason for my comment that people prefer Windows because it meets
their needs, no matter how trivial, better.

>It's not so much the OS that can't do it - given full OS and associated
>utility source, I could change a Unix implementation to handle longer
>names with a couple of days work. But the evolving standards have for
>many years allowed apps to assume that user names were no more than eight
>characters (and some other constraints); even if one could change the OS
>and its utilities, making the change would break the existing apps, unless
>they were updated at the same time. And making a change unilaterally
>would violate the standard, which would mean that the OS in question would
>no longer be entitled to be called Unix.
>
>The point being there are always arbitrary limits of some sort; the
>question is whether it's worth supporting the largest such that people may
>have grown accustomed to even at the expense of whatever consequences
>(like apps breakage) can't help but follow.
>
>What people really want varies; most haven't really thought it through.
>In the extreme, they may want their computer to earn their paycheck for
>them while they stay at home and make like a couch potato. Wanting
>all the arbitrary limits to be as high as any they've previously
>encountered is a bit more reasonable, but if they understand that there
>are indeed sound reasons why the change hasn't been made and can't quickly
>be made (and would likely still have some limitations, such as that the
>name would have to remain unique with 8 characters even if it could be
>longer), they just may appreciate that once a particular arbitrary limit
>has been chosen and in long use, it can't be trivially raised without
>some serious consquences, and as such both the decision not to change
>it and the other benefits of the Unix platform might well be worth
>considering on the merits rather than engaging in unproductive and
>largely non-functional complaining.

Agreed. If you go back and re-read my original response you'll see
that I wasn't complaining about the eight character limit but the
portrayal of the user as a luser because they were unaware of such a
limitation. You did this yourself (actually you called them idiots) in
your previous message.

My point is that you shouldn't be calling someone a luser because of
their belief that a system should accommodate their needs instead of
the other way around. The change to the eight character user ID limit
is a side discussion that is unrelated to that point.

Josh

>BTW, some of the other limitations that can be raised without breaking
>apps may have already been raised. For instance, at one time it was common
>that Unix login would look at the name and if it was all caps, it would
>assume the terminal (pre-GUI days) was incapable of lower case and would
>force all upper case to lower case unless the letters were preceeded by
>a backslash. Since that distinction doesn't affect something likely
>to break apps (like overrunning the fixed-size buffer they had to hold
>user names), the upper-case only support in login could be removed when
>no longer needed. I still wouldn't be inclined to create upper case
>or mixed case account names, lest they break something that hasn't been
>tested, but the possibility may be there.
>
>[If you really wanted to complain about something meaningful, in addition
>to the length limit on user names, I'm surprised you're not complaining
>about the character set limit; presumably folks in non-Roman-alphabet
>language areas would love to be able to have names in their full character
>set. If the length limit could be overcome, that could probably be done
>without too much apps breakage (although "ls -l" in anything other than a
>Unicode locale could get real ugly, and even trigger some nasty responses
>to terminal(-emulator) escape codes), but it would require something to
>work around the colon problem (/etc/passwd fields being separated by
>colons, the byte equivalent to an ASCII colon couldn't be present in the
>stored value unless escaped somehow, in which case everything that parses
>/etc/passwd would have to be changed to deal with that; fortunately,
>/etc/passwd is mostly parsed by the getpw* code (or the backend it calls),
>so most of that could be hidden by shared library enhancements).]
>
>As for file names, one uses one's account name once per session to log in,
>but one uses file names many times per session. The transition in Unix
>from 14 character names to 255 character names did also cause breakage,
>but that was before there was such a widespread expectation of backwards
>binary compatibility; these days, such a change would be much more of a
>problem.
>
>[...]

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