-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- On Thu, 4 Feb 1999, Chris Wong wrote:
> For Debian, user names are limited to 8 characters.. as well > as the passwords. How can this be, lengthened? ... as well as long > email addreses? ie: > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [EMAIL PROTECTED] I don't know how you'd go about lengthening the user name limit (I get the feeling it would require modification of several programs, though), but I do know that the user name in those email addresses is not the acual user name on the system. They're aliases that redirect email to the correct user account. So you could log in as cw, but your email address could be chris.wong. Setting up an alias if you use smail as your MTA is easy. Just add a line to /etc/aliases. In my case, I added: noah.meyerhans: frodo So mail sent to noah.meyerhans goes to frodo. This is often used as a security mechanism: The actual user names are kept secret and only the aliases are given out. If a person doesn't know your login name, there's far less of a likelyhood that they'll be able to use your account to break into the system (in case you happen to have a weak password or something). noah PGP public key available at http://lynx.dac.neu.edu/home/httpd/n/nmeyerha/mail.html or by 'finger -l [EMAIL PROTECTED]' This message was composed in a 100% Microsoft free environment. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBNrpqnYdCcpBjGWoFAQF50AP/bC5WkfQT7nFatE4G7RIj7wJqEhQHp/Zr bSSjK6zahE589YijNXxj0LUwb18krnUi3g/9T5Xpe+jXSar83TGuDfQ8hYVXo6z6 6nbfGPkFxAuXnbAtNtBXIs2hPyWoDX9pfdnMoNkZuW2mkofiQCgkf5A7ZBOeZ4VD iK5KHhG8uqI= =O7Ot -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
