Can't help you on the usernames, but for the password length: enable md5 passes

-----Original Message----- From: lars [mailto:lars@brainlift.de] Sent: Friday, March 28, 2003 2:33 PM To: suse-security@suse.com Subject: [suse-security] How to handle usernames?

Hi there,

I´ve got a strange behaviour which I want to get rid off ... though it may not be the right group here:

on a suse linux 8.1 box, doing

useradd -s /bin/false -d /... and-so-on ... b.richards

to add a mailuseraccount, I always got the reply:

invalid username

The same with

useradd -s /bin/false -d /... and-so-on b\.richards

OK, then I´m typing ³useradd brichards², editing the /etc/passwd as well as /etc/shadow (e.g. setting in the dot manually), then typing in the password, but then ... the client sometimes gets an errormessage from postfix - sometimes it works fine. I found out that in case of unvalid usernames always almost a ³!² is shown in the second field in /etc/shadow-uservalue-lines (where there have to be the shadowed password).

everything works fine with usernames without a dot.

I tried hard to find some informations about this, but the only restriction valid for all shels seemed to be avoiding ³:² and ³/² in usernames.

Anyone a suggestion? would be helpfull... thanx a lot!

greetings

Btw: how can I change the length of a password to a value higher than 8? Possible at all on a bash or tcsh?