[nflug] the limits of 8

Mark Robson markrobson at yahoo.com
Tue Nov 27 14:18:59 EST 2007


http://www.snopes.com/history/american/gauge.asp 
   
  Snopes calls this railroad story 'true but trivial'.  "Triviality", of course, is more than 8 characters.  
   
  Coincidence?  
   
  M

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....




_______________________________________________
nflug mailing list
nflug at nflug.org
http://www.nflug.org/mailman/listinfo/nflug




Mark Robson


       
---------------------------------
Be a better sports nut! Let your teams follow you with Yahoo Mobile. Try it now.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.nflug.org/pipermail/nflug/attachments/20071127/579c8928/attachment.html


More information about the nflug mailing list