Username and Groupname Sizes on HP-UX
• Applications that may have their output parsed by other applications, but do not clearly
define rules for parsing the output.
3.5 Type of Applications that need not consider the Display Guidelines
The following applications need not consider the formatting rules:
• Applications that do not display user or group names.
• Applications that output user/group names, but their output is never parsed by other
applications.
• Applications that have consistent and well defined rules for determining beginning and end of
user/group name fields when parsed by other applications.
• Applications that are not of the type listed in section 3.4
4.0 HP Product Limitations
This section describes HP software product limitations in the support of user names more than eight
bytes in length and/or group names that are more than 16 bytes in length. Some of these limitations
may be removed in product or OS updates made available after the publication of this document.
Note that third
party
and in-house software providers may also have some limitations. While this list is
intended to describe all the HP product limitations, it may not be complete. Any other important
limitations encountered by customers should be reported to HP.
4.1 SNA user and administration
The SNA administration tools snapadmin and xsnapadmin allow 32-character user/group names.
These tools are not enhanced for long user/group names.
4.2 Trusted mode
Long user/group name functionality cannot be enabled under trusted mode. If the system is long
user/group name enabled, the system cannot be switched to trusted mode.
Although HP-UX Trusted Mode does not support the long user and group name functionality, standard
mode security extensions in the base OS, including /etc/shadow and the audit subsystem, do support
long user names. Please refer to
http://software.hp.com/portal/swdepot/displayProductInfo.do?productNumber=StdModSecExt for
more information.
5.0 Programmer Notes - Making Programs Expanded User/group Name Clean
Function Level Versioning (FLV) mechanism does not exist because it is not required by any of the APIs
which return username/groupname. The APIs getpw* and getgr* are scalable to handle the
expanded username/groupname. Moreover, the value for the symbolic constant _POSIX_LOGIN
NAME MAX remains unchanged in 11i v3. It continues to be nine. As per the standards, this
symbolic constant has to be the most restrictive (minimum) value a conforming implementation should
support, which is specified to be nine.
All scalable applications are unaffected by the user and group name expansion. However, there may
be some applications that are not scalable, in which case their code needs modification.
This section describes how software developers can determine whether their product needs any
consideration and, if so, how to enhance the product to accommodate expanded user and group
names.
Enhanced programs also operate correctly in systems where the names are not long. Programs that
have no dependencies on the user and group name size, or which have been enhanced for the
expanded sizes, are said to be expanded user and group name clean.