[rhn-users] RHN Account Policies

[Sander Steffann]

Hi,

> Some time ago RHN suddenly and without warning altered its rules for
> account names. Among other things the hyphen was no longer allowed in
> an account name. This disrupted our policies and procedures for
> managing our accounts. Lots of discussion followed, some at least at
> RHN felt they made a mistake doing that and the policy was changed
> back to allow hyphens although it took a very long time for this to
> find its way back into the code base.

I didn't notice it, but refusing a hyphen could be very annoying, and I 
don't see the point.

> Yesterday it came to my attention while creating an account that RHN
> no longer allows one email address to be associated with more than one
> account on hosted.

This is one thing we also need. We do the server maintenance for different 
companies, and we create separate RHN accounts for those companies. Our 
e-mailaddress is the contact point though. This also feels like a very bad 
move by Red Hat.

> So one question I have is why RHN chooses to enforce what seems to be
> an arbitrary and useless new rule about email addresses?

Indeed. If someone from Red Hat is reading this: please explain, and if 
there is no good reason: please remove this limitation.

> Another is
> why there aren't announcements about such things made in public so
> those of us who will have business operations disrupted will have a
> chance to prepare ourselves before the disruption occurs?

I also agree with you here. These kind of things should be made public in 
advance. If that is not possible, it should be very well documented in for 
example the release notes.

- Sander