Usename Length ??

[Amit Dixit_2]

Hi,
I want to create a login havin more than
8 character as username, but the system
does'nt accept how to do that ??

Thanks,
Amit

[Dave Olker]

Hi Amit,

There is no way to do this on current versions of HP-UX, including 11.23 (11i v2). There is a proposal in the labs to expand the user name and group name limitations to 256 characters in an upcoming release of HP-UX.

To date I don't know whether this proposal has been approved by lab management, so there is no guarantee that this feature will be included in a future release. However, the labs are currently investigating expanding these fields from 8 to 256 characters.

Until then, there is no way to create a user with a username longer than 8 characters.

Regards,

Dave

[A. Clay Stephenson]

This is one of those things that dates back to the dawn of UNIX. Even if you can, you don't want to do it because there is a good change that you will break legacy code that never expected a login to be longer than eight characters. There are some patches that allow a longer login but they come witha huge warning that basically says don't do this.

[Dave Olker]

Mr. Stephenson is correct.

Even if you were able to somehow create a user name with more than 8 characters, it is likely that many HP-UX subsystems would not work correctly with that user name.

For this reason, several labs are working in a coordinated effort to make this change in an upcoming OS release. It's not merely as simple as changing the size of a data structure for user name and group name from 8 to 256; many other HP-UX subsystems and products will need to change, or at least recompile, to make this work seamlessly. Also, the testing efforts involved with making a change of this type are huge since so many products user the user name or group name components.

Again, hopefully long user and group names will be coming soon to an HP-UX OS near you.

Regards,

Dave

[Dave Olker]

Hi Amit,

Please try to remember to reward the people in the ITRC forums who take the time to help you.


I have assigned points to 82 of 417 responses to my questions.


Regards,

Dave