Username and Groupname Sizes on HP-UX

Testing Guidelines: Describes briefly how to test an application to ensure that it works well in an
expanded user and group name enabled environment.
2.0 Enabling the System for expanded User and Group
names
This section describes how an administrator enables the capability to set longer user and group
names.
WARNINGS
Verify whether the versions of all applications which use user and group names are validated
for expanded user and group name sizes before setting the names to longer values
HP recommends that, when longer user or group names are assigned, the proper operation
of all applications be validated in a test environment before they are used in a production
environment.
Some HP products offer limited in their support to long user and group names. (See HP
Product Limitations).
Some optional HP software products, if present on the system, must be updated to support
expanded names.
Third party software products may be limited in their support for long user or group names.
Associated documentation should be consulted for products which may use user or group
names for acknowledgement that expanded names are supported.
Locally developed programs (For example, from an in-house software development
organization) may offer limited support for long user or group names.
Any program which uses
LOGIN_NAME_MAX Macro may get truncated usernames.
Any program that uses the obsolescent API cuser ()and L_cuserid Macro can misbehave.
Refer to the programmer-oriented sections of this document for details about application
issues.
ENABLING EXPANDED USER AND GROUP NAMES
The default operating system configuration does not enable the setting of user name in excess of 8
bytes or a group name in excess of 16 bytes. The system administrator must explicitly enable the
system for expanded username/group name by using the lugadmin command. The details of using
lugadmin command are documented in its man page. The lugadmin –e option enables long
username. Once the system is enabled for long user/group name, it cannot be disabled. A disable
option is not provided due to the impracticality of automatically finding all instances of stable storage
that may contain names in excess of the default limits.
Once the expanded user/group name feature is enabled, all the user and group management
commands (useradd, usermod, userdel, groupadd, groupmod and groupdel) will allow the user to
create/update users with expanded user/group names. All other core components of HP-UX will work
fine with expanded user/group names except for the ones listed in HP Product Limitations.
3.0 Output Formats
With user/group names increasing to 255 bytes, display of long user/group names on terminals can
have issues. Formatting guidelines for displaying the user/group names are followed across all HP
supplied applications/utilities that support long user/group names. The same guidelines must be
followed by all application developers as well.