Extension of login length

[Renante M. Yu_1]

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

[Steven E. Protter]

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

[Renante M. Yu_1]

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.

[Steven E. Protter · Accepted solution]

The process for setting up AD does include an adaptation that allows the ADS server to handle authentication instead of HP-UX.

There is probably some kind of translation table to /etc/passwd. I did it in the HP labs once.

Here are some candidate procedures that might include the information you want.

http://docs.hp.com/cgi-bin/fsearch/framedisplay?top=/hpux/onlinedocs/J4269-90030/J4269-90030_top.html&con=/hpux/onlinedocs/J4269-90030/00/00/19-con.html&toc=/hpux/onlinedocs/J4269-90030/00/00/19-toc.html&searchterms=pam%7cActive%7cDirectory%7cconfiguration%7cLDAP&queryid=20040317-202716
http://docs.hp.com/cgi-bin/fsearch/framedisplay?top=/hpux/onlinedocs/J4269-90031/J4269-90031_top.html&con=/hpux/onlinedocs/J4269-90031/00/00/7-con.html&toc=/hpux/onlinedocs/J4269-90031/00/00/7-toc.html&searchterms=pam%7cActive%7cDirectory%7cconfiguration%7cLDAP&queryid=20040317-202716
http://docs.hp.com/cgi-bin/fsearch/framedisplay?top=/hpux/onlinedocs/J4269-90031/J4269-90031_top.html&con=/hpux/onlinedocs/J4269-90031/00/00/10-con.html&toc=/hpux/onlinedocs/J4269-90031/00/00/10-toc.html&searchterms=pam%7cActive%7cDirectory%7cconfiguration%7cLDAP&queryid=20040317-202716
http://docs.hp.com/cgi-bin/fsearch/framedisplay?top=/hpux/onlinedocs/J4269-90033/J4269-90033_top.html&con=/hpux/onlinedocs/J4269-90033/00/00/12-con.html&toc=/hpux/onlinedocs/J4269-90033/00/00/12-toc.html&searchterms=pam%7cActive%7cDirectory%7cconfiguration%7cLDAP&queryid=20040317-202716
http://docs.hp.com/cgi-bin/fsearch/framedisplay?top=/hpux/onlinedocs/J4269-90030/J4269-90030_top.html&con=/hpux/onlinedocs/J4269-90030/00/00/32-con.html&toc=/hpux/onlinedocs/J4269-90030/00/00/32-toc.html&searchterms=pam%7cActive%7cDirectory%7cconfiguration%7cLDAP&queryid=20040317-202716

SEP

[doug hosking]

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.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

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.