username best practices and other conventions

[Joe Desbonnet]

I think it's time to move beyond those traditional limits. At some
point we got over the 14 char file name limits, and the world is a
better place for it.

I much prefer to spend a few more characters for clarity. Eg
'webalizer' -- I know exactly what that's about. It's for Webalizer. 
'wbalizer', or 'webalize' or 'wlzpf82' or whatever you would use to
make it fit in 8 characters is likely not going to be so obvious.

As long as we don't start putting silly characters like spaces and
umlauts in there :-)

Joe.

On 3/2/06, Dax Kelson <dax at gurulabs.com> wrote:
> I was wondering if Fedora had any guidelines for valid usernames.
> Especially usernames that are part of base and extra packages?
>
> Since, well forever, I've understood the UNIX and Linux username best
> practices to be:
>
> (a) all lowercase
> (b) alphanumeric with exception that first char must not be a number
> (c) 8 char max length
>
> The origin of (a) I believe comes from the fact that historically there
> was a one-to-one mapping between email addresses and usernames and since
> email addresses are not case sensitive, usernames that only differ by
> case cause email ambiguities.
>
> I'm not sure the origin of (b).
>
> The origin of (c) comes from the fact that's the way it has always been
> and older tools and file formats make only have room for 8 characters
> such as old tar or cpio. Additionally once a username exceeds 8
> characters some tools such as /bin/ps and /bin/ls start behaving
> differently. This can cause a cascade problem when sys admins write
> elaborate scripts or even one-off temporary scripts that because
> non-temporary and parse the output of /bin/ps or /bin/ls.
>
> For example, a script that is expecting the first column of /bin/ps
> output to be a username, might go bonkers if it encounters:
>
> avahi     2250  0.0  0.0   2744   436 ?        Ss   Mar01   0:00 avahi-daemon: chroot helper process
> root      2259  0.0  0.0   3084  1172 ?        Ss   Mar01   0:00 cups-config-daemon
> 68        2269  0.0  0.1   5072  3476 ?        Ss   Mar01   0:02 hald
> root      2270  0.0  0.0   3084  1140 ?        S    Mar01   0:00 hald-runner
> 68        2276  0.0  0.0   2192   896 ?        S    Mar01   0:00 /usr/libexec/hald-addon-acpi
> 68        2285  0.0  0.0   2196   900 ?        S    Mar01   0:00 /usr/libexec/hald-addon-keyboard
> root      2292  0.0  0.0   2152   840 ?        S    Mar01   0:00 /usr/libexec/hald-addon-storage
> root      2305  0.0  0.0   1548   448 tty2     Ss+  Mar01   0:00 /sbin/mingetty tty2
>
> IMHO, Fedora should respect the traditional best practices and
> conventions (not speaking solely about usernames) and not violate them
> without good reason. It seems there is maybe a carefree indifference or
> possibly ignorant attitude about the "old ways". Breaking long standing
> conventions in itself violates the principal of least surprise --
> something sys admins do not care for.
>
> In regards to the username violations on my FC4 box I see three
> usernames exceeding the 8 characters in length and on my rawhide box I
> see five. It is getting worse.
>
> For the sake of conversation here is list from a fresh rawhide install
> with a moderate amount of packages installed.
>
> lp = 2
> adm = 3
> bin = 3
> ftp = 3
> gdm = 3
> ntp = 3
> rpc = 3
> rpm = 3
> xfs = 3
> dbus = 4
> halt = 4
> mail = 4
> news = 4
> nscd = 4
> pcap = 4
> root = 4
> sshd = 4
> sync = 4
> uucp = 4
> vcsa = 4
> avahi = 5
> games = 5
> named = 5
> smmsp = 5
> squid = 5
> apache = 6
> daemon = 6
> gopher = 6
> nobody = 6
> netdump = 7
> rpcuser = 7
> torrent = 7
> mailnull = 8
> operator = 8
> shutdown = 8
> distcache = 9
> haldaemon = 9
> nfsnobody = 9
> webalizer = 9
> beagleindex = 11
>
> It isn't a universal trend, but it seems that the newer the program the
> longer the username.
>
> Any comments from the powers that be on this topic? Personally I'd love
> to see these 9+ usernames "fixed".
>
> Dax (getting a grey goatee) Kelson
>
>
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