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Conference turris::digital_unix

Title:DIGITAL UNIX(FORMERLY KNOWN AS DEC OSF/1)
Notice:Welcome to the Digital UNIX Conference
Moderator:SMURF::DENHAM
Created:Thu Mar 16 1995
Last Modified:Fri Jun 06 1997
Last Successful Update:Fri Jun 06 1997
Number of topics:10068
Total number of notes:35879

9669.0. "XISSO Group Name Lenght Problem" by SNOFS1::ROHAN (Trust me I'm a dector) Wed Apr 30 1997 01:01

    Hi,
    
    I have a customer who implemented Xisso after the developement of a very
    large and complex system on 3.2g.
    
    During developement they used long group names but now find that the 
    GUI for Xisso can't handle group names longer than 11 characters. - If
    they enter a long group name the Xisso tool appends the following name
    to that entry. They can work around this by directly editing the file
    but have asked if this limitation is fixed in a later release of Dec
    UNIX or a patch.
    
    
    Cheers ..Steve Rohan
T.RTitleUserPersonal
Name		DateLines
9669.1NNTPD::"[email protected]"Ann MajeskeWed Apr 30 1997 13:3234
From your description, it sounds like your customer has enabled
Enhanced Security.  XIsso and XSysAdmin are designed to only work with
Enhanced Security enabled.  You can find further information on what
Enhanced Security is in the Security Manual.

The gui interface for Enhanced security (XIsso and XSysAdmin) was replaced
completely for V4.0 of Digital UNIX, so the corruption of the database that
your customer is seeing (following name appended to entry) is fixed
in V4.0.  But, I looked at the interface for V4.0 (dxaccounts), and it looks 
like in dxaccounts the length of a group name is restricted even further,
to 8 characters.

The security development group "owns" the /etc/group file.  We have placed no 
limits on the length of a group name in the /etc/group file, except that the
group name must fit in the internal buffer of the library routines created to 
manipulate the /etc/group file entries (see man getgrent.3).  This buffer is 
8192 bytes, so at the lower level the length of a group name is essentially
unrestricted.  But, we have no control over what limits are placed on group 
name length by other commands and applications.

For example, if your customer is using vi to edit the /etc/group file the 
maximum length of a line of the file (including the group name) is 2048 bytes,

the maximum length of a line allowed by vi.  If your customer is using NIS to 
distribute group entries, the maximum length of a group entry (including the 
group name) that can be distributed over NIS is, I think, 1024 bytes.  The
addgroup(1) command restricts the group name to 8 characters.  I could go on
and on...

Since each of these commands and applications is "owned" by a different 
development group, if you want the problem of group name length restrictions
fixed, you'll have to open a QAR or IPMT case against every command and/or
application that you want changed.
[Posted by WWW Notes gateway]