[nflug] the limits of 8

[Brad Bartram]

Pete;

That's actually a great point you touch on there.

For as much as we advance and have the latest whiz-bang features in
the newest bloodiest edge versions of our distro of choice - the
underlying systems are basically the same as they have been for the
last 20+ years.

For anyone serious about getting under the hood of really any modern
os, it is really essential that they understand some of the problems
our ancient forefathers (like Bob Meyers - just kidding) went and
dealt with.  Linux has some pretty scary legacy code haunting some of
the most common areas of the operating system - so does windows, BSD,
solaris, Mac, etc.  All modern systems have their grouchy old men
telling us whipper snappers to stay off the lawn - it can be handy to
know where they live.

Brad

On Nov 27, 2007 8:58 AM, Cyber Source <peter at thecybersource.com> wrote:
> Ah the limits of 8 are still around and they still haunt!
>   For the older guys that can still remember, the limits of 8 were
> always cropping up in the past. A few weeks ago, having still remembered
> this stuff while setting up Bob Meyers dads pc, we couldn't figure out
> why his gaim would not work with his usual passwords while when online
> via meebo, it worked just fine. So then I just put in his password for
> gaim using only the first 8 characters and voila!
>   I wanted to point out something that drove me nuts the past few days
> here. I put a call into Bob Meyer (no answer) and Dave Andruczyk to ask
> if they had ever had a situation where when a certain user was logged
> in, all there processes showed being run by the UID and not the name of
> the user.  Dave had explained that he had seen this before and it's
> nothing to worry about. Me, having this happen on a fresh "dump" of the
> new Gutsy Gibbon thought there was something wrong in my install because
> every single time I created this user, the same thing. I could create
> others before and after and delete, etc.., with no problems, they all
> showed running PID's as the username. So I thought that there must be
> something in my install files that is linking to this persons previous
> install but could find nothing, checked /etc/passwd, /etc/group,
> /etc/shadow, nothing.
>   Then I figured it out!
>   As alot of times, I get ideas when waking up or just away from it. The
> simple answer was is that the user name was more than 8 characters! Now,
> I tested it with multiple different user names and every one that has
> more than 8 characters, will show the PID's as the UID's and NOT the
> user name!!!
>   Just in case someone else encounters this, they may recall this and
> realize what is going on....
>
>
>
>
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