dot allowed adduser/useradd

Alexander Dalloz alexander.dalloz at uni-bielefeld.de
Tue Feb 3 12:47:45 UTC 2004


Am Di, den 03.02.2004 schrieb WipeOut um 13:30:
> Alexander Dalloz wrote:
> 
> >Am Di, den 03.02.2004 schrieb Balint Cristian um 12:44:
> >  
> >
> >>Hi !
> >>
> >>	I already digged maillist, i understand why cannot be dot in the username
> >>while i "adduser", my Q is that if there is some workaround or some patch, i really need to allow dot in usernames
> >>it is to ugly to modify /etc/pass entry's.
> >>	I looket too at src.rpms i coud not figure out where to touch, i see no redhatish patch wich remove the dot feauture
> >>and in tarball is difficult to find out.
> >>
> >>Any sugestion ?
> >>
> >>cristian
> >>    
> >>
> >
> >For what reason should it be good to have dots in usernames to be
> >allowed? Any real good reason?
> >
> >Dots are at least forbidden charactes in usernames and groupnames as
> >chown will fail with such names.
> >
> >Alexander
> >
> >
> >  
> >
> My reason was to make it possible for a user with the email address 
> "first.last at domain.com", which is out company standard convention for 
> email addresses, to log into their mail box with "first.last".. That way 
> they don't get confused about their email address and user name (as 
> users often do).. These users do not log into the system shell as they 
> are only for mail..
> 
> Is that a good enough reason?
> 
> later..

Hi :)

I do not think it is a valuable reason. People can use mail addresses in
the form of "first.last at domain.tld" without need for dotted login names
in the system. They are confused about login name being "flast" instead
of "first.last"? How often do they have to refill their login data into
mail programs? Users not able to fill in authentication data should not
be allowed to send mail at all. ;/ It's fairly common to use "flast" for
authentification and "first.last@" in mail addresses. You see my mail
address? What do you think is my login name to the university mail
system? :)

Did you ever create a mailbox in cyrus-imapd with first.last as mailbox
name?

Alexander


-- 
Alexander Dalloz | Enger, Germany | GPG key 1024D/ED695653 1999-07-13
Fedora GNU/Linux Core 1 (Yarrow) on Athlon CPU kernel 2.4.22-1.2149.nptl
Sirendipity 13:41:24 up 3 days, 12:41, load average: 0.35, 0.21, 0.18 
                   [ Γνωθι σ'αυτον - gnothi seauton ]






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