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Re: Username restrictions (chars, length) - conventions?



On Sat, Nov 27, 2004 at 07:07:55PM +0100, Ralf Gesel|ensetter wrote:
> Hi there,
> 
> at the moment, newly created user names are restricted by wlus to
> - 8 characters of length

This limit is due to the limitation on user name length in POSIX.  See
_POSIX_LOGIN_NAME_MAX in
<URL:http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908799/xsh/limits.h.html>.
You might contact the Austin Group,
<URL:http://www.opengroup.org/austin/>, and ask if the minimum value
could be increased, but I do not believe it will be easy to get them
to change the value.  If you get the POSIX standard changed,
debian-edu will change our limit when all the relevant implementations
start following the updated standard specification.

> - only alphanumeric characters 

This is to avoid problems with software packages expecting user names
to consist of alphanumeric characters.  It is my experience that such
systems still exist, and it is wise to avoid problems by sticking to
'[a-z][a-z0-9]+' only.



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