Re: uid with ":" (colon) not a valid username ?

[Arthur de Jong <arthur [at] arthurdejong.org>]

On Thu, 2011-02-24 at 10:32 +0530, Vinay Kalkoti wrote:
> In the LDAP server, I have a user name with ":" (colon) in it.
> 
> When I do a getent passwd, I see that nslcd logs the following error
> and "getent passwd" doesn't list that user account at all -
> 
> nslcd: [588f54] passwd entry uid=test_user:IT,ou=people,dc=xx,dc=xx,dc=com 
> contains invalid user name: "test_user:IT"
> 
> Is ":" colon an invalid character in uid ?.

Allowing an : in usernames may work in some very limited circumstances
but it is very likely to break applications. The : is used as a
separator in /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow and so also not allowed for
local users.

If you need this you can try adapting the isvalidname() function in
nslcd/common.c. This function is used for both user and group names and
allow a little more thank POSIX allows:
http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/basedefs/xbd_chap03.html#tag_03_426
http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/basedefs/xbd_chap03.html#tag_03_276

Perhaps it's a good idea to implement this check as a configurable
regular expression. If someone is willing to write some code for that
I'm willing to integrate it.

-- 
-- arthur - arthur@arthurdejong.org - http://arthurdejong.org --

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