-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hi! Yes, I know I'm rendering myself a fusspot and smart-ass, but... Am Mittwoch, 20. November 2002 16:27 schrieb Peer Stefan:
Dotted usernames were a bug until SuSE 8.0.
... this is not quite right, as far as I understand the documents. Am Donnerstag, 21. November 2002 11:41 schrieb Olaf Kirch:
There are certain conventions in the Unix world, and while it's hard to justify them in detail it's a good idea to adhere to them nevertheless. You can add a user name of ";-)" to /etc/passwd and that may even work for a surprising number of applications - but there will be the odd application that was coded with the assumption that if it's not alphanumerics, it's not a user name.
Although SuSE Linux and GNU/Linux are "only" free Operating Systems, they usually try to adhere certain standards - in many cases the POSIX standard. The Posix standard (excerpt from http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007904975/basedefs/xbd_chap03.html#tag_0...) says the following: ====================== User Name A string that is used to identify a user; see also User Database . To be portable across systems conforming to IEEE Std 1003.1-2001, the value is composed of characters from the portable filename character set. The hyphen should not be used as the first character of a portable user name. ====================== and in http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007904975/basedefs/xbd_chap03.html#tag_0... ====================== The set of characters from which portable filenames are constructed. A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 . _ - The last three characters are the period, underscore, and hyphen characters, respectively. ====================== Whether it makes sense or not - the Posix standard thus explicitely _includes_ the dot as a valid character in user names. Result: Either I missed the Posix errata, or the SuSE-supplied GNU useradd is not Posix conforming. One could even regard this a security problem... Regards, Bastian - -- Bastian Friedrich bastian@bastian-friedrich.de Adress & Fon available on my HP http://www.bastian-friedrich.de/ \~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~\ \ Girls are like internet domain names, the ones I like are already \ taken. Well, you can still get one from a strange country. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.7 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQE93QXBlbo7EtEt1mYRArGxAJ9yDJfsCGWeIm+wdxCqrt3tGncUCACgnrQW RGyKmwsAfY8euKdDLiVIeds= =/eg4 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----