Re: User names.
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On Thu, 4 Feb 1999, Chris Wong wrote:
> For Debian, user names are limited to 8 characters.. as well
> as the passwords. How can this be, lengthened? ... as well as long
> email addreses? ie:
>
> chris.wong@domain.com
> christopher_wong@domain.com
I don't know how you'd go about lengthening the user name limit (I get
the feeling it would require modification of several programs, though),
but I do know that the user name in those email addresses is not the acual
user name on the system. They're aliases that redirect email to the
correct user account. So you could log in as cw, but your email address
could be chris.wong.
Setting up an alias if you use smail as your MTA is easy. Just add a line
to /etc/aliases. In my case, I added:
noah.meyerhans: frodo
So mail sent to noah.meyerhans goes to frodo. This is often used as a
security mechanism: The actual user names are kept secret and only the
aliases are given out. If a person doesn't know your login name, there's
far less of a likelyhood that they'll be able to use your account to break
into the system (in case you happen to have a weak password or something).
noah
PGP public key available at
http://lynx.dac.neu.edu/home/httpd/n/nmeyerha/mail.html
or by 'finger -l frodo@ccs.neu.edu'
This message was composed in a 100% Microsoft free environment.
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