CentOS - Nov 2010 - Best practices for the maximal length of user names

Hello,

are there any best practices for the length of user names?

I tend to limit them to 8 characters and to follow the pattern 'first
letter of the first name'+'first 7 letters of the last name' (e.g.
mbaudier).

But people are sometimes frustrated with having their last name
truncated and I wonder if limiting the user name to 8 characters is
not a kind of superstition coming from some old times...

I would be very interested to hear opinions / experience about this.
(I'm using CentOS 5.5)

Thanks in advance!

Mathieu

On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 1:25 PM, Mathieu Baudier <mbaudier at argeo.org>
wrote:
> Hello,
>
> are there any best practices for the length of user names?
>
> I tend to limit them to 8 characters and to follow the pattern 'first
> letter of the first name'+'first 7 letters of the last name'
(e.g.
> mbaudier).
>
> But people are sometimes frustrated with having their last name
> truncated and I wonder if limiting the user name to 8 characters is
> not a kind of superstition coming from some old times...
>
> I would be very interested to hear opinions / experience about this.
> (I'm using CentOS 5.5)
>
> Thanks in advance!
>
> Mathieu
> _______________________________________________
> CentOS mailing list
> CentOS at centos.org
> http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
>
Never had problems with username lengths. Haven't really made any
measurements but I had quite long names i.e.
username at some-long-mail-domain.com without any problems.

On 11/13/2010 05:25 AM, Mathieu Baudier wrote:
> But people are sometimes frustrated with having their last name
> truncated and I wonder if limiting the user name to 8 characters is
> not a kind of superstition coming from some old times...

CentOS5 supports 31 characters for user names (I tested it). 8 character 
limits for user names was a holdover from some truly ancient Unix 
systems and has been pretty much irrelevant to Linux for more than ten 
years.

There is no reason I can think of to limit user names in Linux to 8 
characters now unless you need to inter-operate account logins with an 
old Unix box that still has that limit.

-- 
Benjamin Franz