[svlug] SuSE root prob

[Walter Reed]

At 04:07 AM 11/18/98 , Javilk wrote:
>     It does not accept the account "webmaster", as being one letter too
>long.  Webmaster is a popular account name, one that spammers, at least
>general spammers, tend to avoid.  (Webmasters get page promotion spam
>instead...)
>
>     Since I am subscribed to a bunch of web related mailing lists as
>webmaster, and since the other machine has a webmaster ID with a home
>directory I expect to NFS mount, etc. etc., this is intolerable!
>
>     What is the way around this problem.  Unsubscribing from the mailing
>lists and changing the e-mail address of hundreds of web pages to some
>other address is just not a viable solution! 

Real user ID's are not "supposed" to be more than 8 characters long. 
According to some docs I read a long time ago, there may be "problems"
with user ID's of more than 8 characters (probably buffer overflow issues.)

Having said that, I HAVE created some accounts with user ID's longer than 8
characters on Slackware with no problems (they were Email-only accounts.)

The best thing to do if you use this account for multiple purposes is to
call the account "web" or something and make an alias in /etc/aliases.
(If you have multiple "webmasters" because you are hosting multiple domains,
use the "virtusertable" feature in sendmail instead.)

The problem this causes is that mail FROM "web" shows the email address as 
"web" instead of "webmaster". This is fixable with the sendmail 
"genericstable" feature. If your not running sendmail, your MTA may or
may not support this type of address manipulation.

If you are hosting multiple domains and want to keep your "webmasters"
separate, this is one of the best solutions anyway. That way you can have
cust1 be webmaster at cust1.com, cust2 be webmaster at cust2.com, etc. all on
the same machine.

All this stuff is documented in the cf/README file included with 
sendmail.

Better yet, get the Bat (sendmail) book from www.ora.com.




--
Walter Reed
Engineering Director
InterTrade Systems Corp.


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