[Preston] unlimiting 32 character username limit

[Andrew King]

On Fri, May 20, 2005 at 05:52:26PM +0100, Stephen wrote:
> Why would u ever want a user longer than 32 chars

Unfortunately we had to - we were tipped off that the Russian authorities had planted some trojan in our server and that they'd kick us out of our own system and then wipe out the entire contents of /home and /var if we didn't work out how to create a 33-char username.

Sorry.  It's just clients isn't it.  They come along and say "We want the computer to do this".  We can try and argue common sense into them all day long but if they just won't have it and they're waving money at us, who are we to argue.  I have this view too that since computers and software are totally man-made and artificial, we shouldn't have to have such absolute limitations placed on us, since it's just a case of altering software some way or another.  That's one thing that makes open source fantastic isn't it.  It's nice to be able to say to clients "Yes, we can do that, no problem" rather than "Sorry, you've got to do it this way" too.

Anyway, it turns out that the client actually just wanted an e-mail address that broke that limit, and that it didn't actually matter if the username to go with the mailbox was shorter.  So we just made use of the virtusertable feature in Sendmail, like this

(1) Add an entry into /etc/mail/virtusertable:

reallyreallyreallyreallylongemailaddress at somewhere.com	username

(2) Recompile the virtusertable:

cd /etc/mail ; makemap hash virtuserable.db < virtusertable.txt

(3) Restart sendmail:

killall -HUP sendmail

(4) Test

Many thanks to all for the info on the 32-char limit and helping us realise that it was just easier to put up with that limit and work around it with sendmail than to try and increase the limit.

All the best,

Andrew

 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: preston-bounces at mailman.lug.org.uk
> [mailto:preston-bounces at mailman.lug.org.uk] On Behalf Of John Craven
> Sent: 20 May 2005 12:54
> To: preston at mailman.lug.org.uk
> Subject: [Preston] unlimiting 32 character username limit
> 
> I am running Redhat 7.3 and with to add a user name more than 32 characters
> long.
> e.g. adduser qwerty.asdfgh.zxcvbn-qwert-asdfgh (this is 33 characters long
> incl dots)
> 
> Does anybody know if this limit can be increased and if so how to do it.
> 
> Thanks,