User logon with capitalized username

[Scott G. Gallup]

I am running a K460 with HP-UX 10.20. What needs to be done to allow users to login using a login id in uppercase characters and still allow users the ability to use login id with lower case characters.

Thanks

[Joseph C. Denman]

Converting to a trusted system give you more flexability.


....jcd...

[Shannon Petry]

If it's only a single character, then duplicate the passwd entry for the user. I.E.
johndoe:ABC:111:111:J.D.,,,:/home/johndoe:/bin/ksh
Johndoe:ABC:111:111:J.D.,,,:/home/johndoe:/bin/ksh


However, this may lead to mysterious X problems later on down the road as the ID's are NOT the same, but share the UID and GID.

This means too that if Johndoe changes his password, then johndoe must also change!

I guess the best way to handle this is tell the users that UNIX is not Windows. Windows may not care about case, but then again who is more stable and secure :)


Regards,
Shannon

[Bill Hassell]

Most readers of this forum will not remember that Unix is based on minicomputers with teletype machines for input, the old ASR 33 and the bigger ASR 35. Early teletypes had nothing but caps so users had no choice but to use all capital letters for logins and passwords.

Later, with the advent of lowercase (a whopping 96 characters), Unix had to accomodate both the all caps logins as well as mixed case. Until recently, stty would be called to change the entire interaction to all UPPPERCASE. Try this:

stty olcuc

(man stty for further details) And to return to normal, use STTY -OLCUC (don't worry about the CapsLock key, the tty driver will handle it for you.

So if you logged on with an all caps login and password, HP-UX would assume that you cannot handle lowercase and everything would be displayed in UPPERCASE for the rest of the session. I think the last revision of HP-UX that supported this behavior was 7.0, maybe 8.0, circa late 80's early 90's.

So, that's the reasoning behind UPPERCASE login/passwords. And yes, it's really important to educate PeeCee users that UPPER and lower case characters are different. On all my PeeCees, I have physically removed the most useless key on the keyboard: CapsLock

WHY YOU ASK? HAVE YOU EVER TRIED TO READ EMAIL WRITTEN IN CAPS? OR WORSE, YOU'RE EDITING IN VI AND THE KEYS DON'T WORK RIGHT? Your typing teacher never told you to use the Caps Lock key, that's what the shift key is for. It's also a conversation piece on my laptop. Real computer users never use the Caps Lock key.

[Dan Hetzel]

Hi Scott,

Bill ir right. ALL CAPS EMAIL SOUNDS LIKE SHOUTING.

Even here with strange French/Belgian keyboards (AZERTY and not QWERTY) and the strange accented characters, users never use the KEYCAPS LOCK key.
All users access the HP servers from their PC desktops with Exceed and, once educated, never complain about Unix processing UPPERCASE/lowercase differently.

Best regards,

Dan

PS: not sure they will show up properly but here is the kind of keys we have: ????????? ;-)

[Scott G. Gallup]

Thanks for the quick responses. As a point of clarification: the users of this system would love to be able to type like normal computer users. Unfortunately, the developers of the applications ("real" computer users?) that the company uses decided to make extensive use of alpha characters in their database indexes. Rather than inconvenience themselves and add the code to convert necessary entries to upper case their solution was to require all users to keep the caps lock key on at all times. So, until I can either rewrite or replace the current applications (a one-year process that has just begun) I was looking for a way to allow users to continue to work as they have during the past 10 years.
Thanks,

Scott

[Wodisch · Accepted solution]

Hello Scott,
you could try to reset the STTY flags in /etc/profile:
stty -olcuc -iuclc -xcase
The only problem left would be the password - those
users would need an ALL LOWERCASE password
(lower!) for in between entering username and start
of the shell everything is changed to lower case; hence
in case of a lowercase username (doing it 'right') they
could enter uppercase characters in their password
which then could NOT be reproduced when logging in
with an uppercase username.
I have not tried that, but it should work.
In case of real serial lines ('ttys') you could reset those
flags in the FINAL FLAGS part of the paragraph used
within "/etc/gettydefs"...

HTH,
Wodisch

[Bruce Regittko_1]

Hi Scott,

In Unix, when you log on with all upper case, you are telling the system that your terminal does not recoginize lower case characters. To overcome this, issue the

stty -lcase

command from either /etc/profile (and /etc/login) or from each user's .profile (and .login). This command will unset the xcase, iuclc, and olcuc options of stty that get set by the system with a upper case login. As always, see the stty(1) man page for more information.

--Bruce