Username Length and Password Expiry

[Darren Tucker]

mark clarkson wrote:
> I am having a problem with usernames that are longer than 8 characters
> on the following system types:
> 
> Solaris 8, Solaris 9
> OpenSSH 4.2p1
> OpenSSL 0.9.8a
> 
> When logging in with an SSH client like PuTTY, OpenSSH or SecureCRT,
> the username is truncated when the password is asked to be changed.
[...]
>     WARNING: Your password has expired.
>     You must change your password now and login again!
>     passwd: Changing password for bclarkso
>     passwd: User unknown: bclarkso
>     Permission denied
> 
> Notice the "n" at the end of the user name is dropped.

All it does in that case is run "passwd" with no arguments.  If you log
on (via telnet or ssh) and just run "passwd", does that work?

Solaris doesn't seem to support usernames longer than 8 chars:
$ uname -sr
SunOS 5.8
$ sudo useradd abcdefghi
UX: useradd: abcdefghi name too long.

> This works just fine using telnet as can be seen in the output below:
[...]
> Does anyone know of any fixes for this or if it is a bug?

You can try building with and enabling PAM (that's probably what telnet
is using).

-- 
Darren Tucker (dtucker at zip.com.au)
GPG key 8FF4FA69 / D9A3 86E9 7EEE AF4B B2D4  37C9 C982 80C7 8FF4 FA69
    Good judgement comes with experience. Unfortunately, the experience
usually comes from bad judgement.