[OpenIndiana-discuss] Long User Names for Email Advice

[Peter Tribble]

On Fri, Nov 30, 2012 at 5:59 PM, Nicholas Metsovon <nmetsovo at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I've been building an OpenIndiana server to replace our existing Linux web server.  I've always - since the 70's - wanted to run a real Unix server.  I have the server almost built, and everything so far is working great.  Glory be to our holy God!  However last night, when I was configuring the email, I went to add another user using the GUI tool, since I'm not that familiar with all of the Solaris command line tools, in order to test the email further.
>
> It was then that I discovered that it would only let me add a user with no more than eight characters.  In searching the net, I found a post where it said that if I added the user via the command line, it would complain about it being more than eight characters, but would go ahead and add it anyway.
>
> I'm using uw-imap.  I know that if I was to use Cyrus imap, which doesn't require a system user account for email recipients, none of this would matter; but I don't like Cyrus imap.  And I like uw-imap a lot.
>
> The users that have names longer than eight characters would only ever log into the system to check their mail via either SquirrelMail, or the mail client on their workstations.  It's not like they'd ever actually log into the system itself.
>
> So, my big question is, am I likely to run into problems if I use the command line tool to add user names longer than eight characters?  Does anyone out there have any experience with this?

I've used usernames with well over 8 characters for years, without
any serious issues. At least with usernames up to 12-14 characters

You'll run into lots of cosmetic problems (columns in ls and ps
output won't line up prettily, that sort of thing). More serious is
occasional truncation (including utilities like ps truncating
usernames as input). One of the more annoying aspects of this
is the fact that different tools start to exhibit problems at different
lengths. However, given your use case, most of these issues are
just irrelevant.

-- 
-Peter Tribble
http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/