Fw: length of the login id

["Edward Rolison" <ed.rolison@byzantium.com>]

> Thornton Prime wrote .....
> ->
> -> On Fri, 2 Feb 2001, Rayappa Mayakunthala wrote:
> -> > Our local office has recently been taken over by a new company. This
new
> -> > company uses 3-char login id for both NT and Unix and our office had
been
> -> > using 8-char login id for both NT and Unix. Now the question is
whether we
> -> > should migrate to 3-char or not. Though it is lot of work and it is
going to
> -> > break various things, this would be forced upon us by the management
at some
> -> > point. This new company is 800+ employee strong and our office 300+
employee
> -> > strong and that is making me think towards 3-char as it is easy to
change
> -> > few users than lot of users.
> -> >
> -> > Any thoughts?
> ->
> -> Apart from the fact that a 3-character login id is silly?
> -> It just seems to me that a 3 character login is poor planning on your
> -> parent company's part ... they should be encouraged to migrate to 8
> -> character logins.

> Am I missing something here? Why does anyone want to
> change? If some folks want a login name of 3 char's, let
> them have 3 char's. If they want to use 8 (or 5, 6, or 7)
> char's, let them use that number. The only important
> thing is to avoid duplication - right?

Because management doesn't really need a reason to inflict more work on
'Those Systems Layabouts"?
IMHO you are right though, unless they want some form of _really_ lazy
scripting. (cycling through letters rather than bothering to parse the
passwd file or equivalent).

Only minor concern is that if you know they have 3char passwords, it becomes
easier to guess valid user codes for crack attempts.
Although usercodes aren't generally 'secret' anyway...

PS I did exactly the same thing trying to figure out the available number of
usercodes. Spooky.