Hi all,

Our management want to use all numeric username (8 digits) in our systems which runs RedHat/CentOS/Fedora/Solaris/HP-UX.

Solaris doesn't like username longer than 8 characters and treats numeric username as uid.
I'd like to know if there is any
document that mentions restriction on the username format on various linux distro.

Would anyone pls help? Thanks.

Hi,

I answered this a long time ago (old thread).

In short: Officially you are not allowed to let a login name start with a number and (some) flavors will complain about this.

You could try the solution that is given in the forementioned thread: Manually edit the /etc/passwd file. It would not be something I would do....

Hope this helps.

I won't do that neither.

Found that some tools like system-config-user, quota, etc. don't like numeric usernames...

Thanks a lot.

My system (Mepis) was more than happy to create a user named "1234". so I guess the answer is "it depends"

But--why fight an unnecessary battle??? What is the benefit of all numeric user names?

One way to circulate this problem, if they like it and the system used lets you put numbers in the name (but not begin it with a number), is to simply put one letter in front of all usernames; for example create users like a1234567, a2345671, a3456712 etc. I would still rather use usernames with letters too, and I hope you're not using digit-only passwords: using letters means more alternatives compared to just numbers, which means more work to crack a password. For a username it's not that important because usernames are generally less secret than passwords, or so it seems.

Our managers only yell "we want to make organization id and username on linux/unix machines the same" (organization id is unique identifier used in my organization...they're all numbers).

They never tell me why this is necessray. :-( I'm gathering information about the downside of such "management decision".

Thanks to all who replied.