strange quota problem - wrong UIDs

[Götz Reinicke]

Hi,

recently I noticed, that we do have a problem with quota on some accounts.

Our students have nummeric usernames like 010203 and there accounts are 
generated "semiautomatically" by using the scriptfunktion of webmin.

Now a "repqouta -a" shows the current usage, but some accounts have 
compleatly different values if I try to change their quota with edquota.

e.g. the user with the name "0106322" anmd the ID 1093 from /etc/passwd 
looks like this:

repquota:
0106322   +-  101204   81920  163840   none       1     0     0

edquota:
Disk quotas for user 0106322 (uid 36050):
Filesystem   blocks   soft   hard     inodes     soft     hard
/dev/sda6         0      0      0          0        0        0

The strange thing is, that I do have users whith the right UID in ther 
quota settings and a nummeric username.

Any ideas, hints or tricks? What could be the problem and better, how to 
solve this?

Thanks and best regards

Götz Reinicke

[James Wilkinson]

Götz Reinicke wrote:
> recently I noticed, that we do have a problem with quota on some accounts.
> Our students have nummeric usernames like 010203 and there accounts are 
> generated "semiautomatically" by using the scriptfunktion of webmin.

As you've probably spotted by now, Unix has problems with all-numeric
usernames. Many programs will accept either a username or an (also
numeric) user-ID as a way of identifying a user.  If you have a username
that is the same as a user-id, you can't be sure which user the command
will think you meant.

To add to the problem, leading zeros often mean "this number is octal",
so 010203 may not be the number you think it is.

The real solution, unfortunately, is not to have all-numeric usernames.

James.