Change Username parameters on HPUX 11.31

[mdsims9669]

Hello all, I'm very new here so I apologize up front for any ignorance in my questions.. I'm experiencing an issue where we're trying to convert all of our users to begin using an all numeric login to streamline our provisioning process.  However, whenever I go to create a user in our HPUX environment, it FORCES me to use an alpha-numeric username.  I want this username to match what I can create in other systems so that there is ONE unique identifier across the system, and not several.  I'm confident there is some way I can change this setting via a config file somewhere, but I have no idea where that's at... can anyone please help me out here??  Thank you all in advance for your time.. 

[Torsten.]

AFAIR a username must start with a letter, always.

[Bill Hassell]

The error message is there for many, many reasons. And the same error message will occur on many other operating systems. Using an all numeric user id is a bad idea and will create a *lot* of problems on mutiple platforms. If management insists on this 'standard', put a letter in front like a as in a123456. 

[Patrick Wallek]

If you really want to create totally numeric user and/or group names, then you must first install the package NumericUsername.  It is available for free from:  

https://h20392.www2.hpe.com/portal/swdepot/displayProductInfo.do?productNumber=NumericUserGroup

Be sure you know what you are getting into though because, as Bill said, completely numeric user names can cause issues.

Good luck.

[mdsims9669]

Understood.. Thank you everyone for the replies!  As I said before, I'm very new to this, so I'm curious as to what "issues" an all numeric ID could cause?  I'm just trying to educate myself since I don't have much experience in the HPUX world.  Thank you again to everyone for the valuable feedback!

[Bill Hassell · Accepted solution]

As mentioned, this isn't just HP-UX.
Some flavors of Linux as well as commercial Unices like Solaris and AIX will have some difficulties. 
While Windows or Macs might allow numbers as a login name, you'll need to do a thorough search for all the OS versions where you'll be implementing this standard. Spend a hour or two with Mr. Google looking for numeric user names or numeric login names.

Here's just a short list of HP-UX issues -- some cross several *nix flavors:

You would break the chmod command because the test that is used to determine whether or not the argument supplied is a login name or a UID is to look at thge first character of ther argument. If it's a numeric character then the argument is assummed to be a UID.

The ls -l command will return the UID (user ID number) when there is no match to the owner of a file.
With all numeric names, there is no simple way to identify orphaned files.

Leading zero names (01234) may be misinterpeted as octal and lead to wrong user name.

Other programs may drop all leading zeros (000123 = 123).

If your user names are longer than 8 characters, you'll have to use lugadmin to convert your password file and related authentication programs to allow up to 256 characters. This will add additional incompatibility to some programs that cannot use long user names.

Finally, older versions of HP-UX (prior to 11.31) may not have numeric usernames and long user names.
If you are the primary sysadmin for these systems, you can turn down the request indicating that to do so represents a uneccessary business risk.