topic Re: Extension of login length in Operating System - HP-UX

Extension of login length

Renante M. Yu_1 — Wed, 17 Mar 2004 21:50:03 GMT

Hi to all unix gurus,

Is there a way to extend the length of the login ids in HPUX? I need to extend it up to 20 chars.
Please help.

Thanks and more power to all!

Regards,

Teng Yu

Re: Extension of login length

Steven E. Protter — Wed, 17 Mar 2004 21:57:45 GMT

Not that I know of.

You can however handle login authentication with a LDAP server thats off the HP-9000 box. Authentication will be handled there and have extended characterstics.

Some people use Microsoft Active Directory Servers for the purpose. There is plenty of doucmentation on that setup in the itrc search engine.

SEP

Re: Extension of login length

Renante M. Yu_1 — Wed, 17 Mar 2004 22:10:26 GMT

Sep,

Currently, I am using PAM. Authentication of password are made thru Active Directory. I use AD for network logins while we use HPUX for our billing systems. I must also sync the login ids from AD to HPUX, right? in AD, there were login ids with more or less 15 chars which is definitely won't accept by the HPUX since it only accepts 8 chars. How do i configure the HPUX by increasing the length of login ids as the same with AD?

Thanks again.

Re: Extension of login length

Steven E. Protter — Wed, 17 Mar 2004 22:29:59 GMT

Re: Extension of login length

doug hosking — Fri, 19 Mar 2004 12:25:13 GMT

Unfortunately there is no way to do this in released HP-UX systems without significant compatibility breaks and security risk.

As just one example of the problem, the utmp/wtmp file format isn't sufficient to hold the longer length. There are many more such issues.

HP is painfully aware of the need to address this, but it's a lot harder than it sounds to properly fix it, in part because of third party software issues. Any fix for it would have to be done as part of a new release, not in patches.

PHCO_21833 has some info relevant to this but I stress that the procedure mentioned in that is NOT supported and is known to not be safe.

Re: Extension of login length

A. Clay Stephenson — Fri, 19 Mar 2004 12:28:59 GMT

The fundamental problem with this (and this applies to all flavors of UNIX) is that there too many legacy applications that make the assumption that login names will never exceed 8 characters. If you do this, you may find that application that have worked for years (or decades) without problems suddenly fail in very strange ways.