username length limited to 16 characters

[rcrh]

Is there something special that has to be done to create user names longer then 16 characters? The documentation wiki says they can be up to 30 characters?

 

[peterh]

Any more then 8 characters will risk multi-environment interoperability. 16 characters is usually interoperable but above that will bite you when you least want it.

Use shorter names ( and the users will thank you )

 

[rcrh]

Any more then 8 characters will risk multi-environment interoperability. 16 characters is usually interoperable but above that will bite you when you least want it.

Use shorter names ( and the users will thank you )

If only our parents knew this when they named us. Shame on them for not thinking about interoperability. ;-)

But seriously, the manual says usernames can be 30 characters.

 

[James]

It looks like it was 30, then changed back to 16 with this commit: http://support.freenas.org/changeset/6845/freenas. I'll update the docs accordingly. The 16 limit is to satisfy a legacy FreeBSD API, cuserid(3). pw(1) uses this limit for compatibility reasons.

Thanks for bringing this up!

 

[James]

To further this thread, a patch (http://freenas.svn.sourceforge.net/...nclude-utmp.h.patch?view=markup&pathrev=11388) was just added to 8.2 to raise that limit to 32 to allow for longer AD names. The suggestion to limit manually generated usernames to 8 characters is still the best practice for interoperability and backwards compatibility with some applications.

 

[peterh]

If only our parents knew this when they named us. Shame on them for not thinking about interoperability. ;-)

But seriously, the manual says usernames can be 30 characters.

user-id on a computer system is not the same as human names.
Users likes short and "nicksnames", we also have no control over how many "hohn smith" is on salary list,
but if each "john smith" is given the opportunity to choose his user-id then everyone is happy.