Re: SSH Connection

Actually, I would've said the opposite. It seems like IBM is being overly cautious (perhaps even ridiculously cautious) by limiting the userid to 8 characters.

Almost all code written for Unix is intended to work on any Unix OS computer with minimal or no changes. Many Unix systems have userids that can potentially be longer than 8 characters. So it seems rather unlikely to me that anything (except, perhaps, home-grown software) would be written with the expectation that 8 will always be the limit.

Due to the way strings work in C, a good C programmer will almost never make assumptions about string length. If he's expecting a length no longer than 8, he'll just chop off the string at 8 (thus, the error won't be any worse than what you have now!) Or, more likely, he'll dynamically allocate the string so that any length will work.

So I suspect that in most IBM i shops, setting this variable is pretty safe.


bdietz400@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

This technote makes it sound like it is not a good idea.

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=0&dc=DB520&dc=D900&dc=D800&dc=DA900&dc=DA800&q1=PASE_USRGRP_LIMITED+AND+AS400KBXXYYZZRCH&uid=nas1eef0693d703c2c4186257394007dc491&loc=en_US&cs=UTF-8&lang=all

<snip>
When running ls -l in a PASE environment, users might see numbers in the place of the object owner user profile. This is because the user profile is greater than 8 characters. A circumvention for the problem is to set the following environment variable:

PASE_USRGRP_LIMITED=N

This option only enables the command ls -l to display the first 8 characters of the user ID, not the full user ID.

Setting this environment variable can have unexpected results in other application and runtime code, particularly in code that assumes the User ID will be no greater than 8 characters.
</snip>

On Sep 22, 2009 5:08pm, Walt Madden <walterross@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Jon Paris wrote:

I was trying to use an SSH connection with a 10 character user id and

it refused to connect claiming invalid ID/password.

It turns out (and many of you may know this already) that the user Id

for SSH can only be 8 characters max as stated here:

I suspect that sshd may allow userid's > 8 characters if you set the

environment variable PASE_USRGRP_LIMITED=N in the process where you start

/usr/sbin/sshd

--

-----

Walt Madden

IBM i software development