Re: Limiting user profiles to 8 characters

Hello Rob,

Am 28.09.2022 um 15:37 schrieb Rob Berendt <rob@xxxxxxxxx>:

Ok, so the reason was: "IBM i user names and group names returned by runtime functions such as getpwuid and getgrgid are normally limited to 8 characters (to avoid exceeding the amount of buffer space provided by some AIX utilities and runtime)."

So, it's something IBM i inherited from AIX. I wonder if current AIX versions still have this limitation, or if there is also such an envvar to be set.

And in the thread you referenced I asked some questions related to this which never got answered:

Since this environment variable is not really bleeding edge can I hope that others may have discovered most of the buffer overruns, reported them, and had the issue resolved by fixing the program with the buffer overrun and not by reverting the environment variable?

How big of a concern is this? (to avoid exceeding the amount of buffer space provided by some AIX utilities and runtime)

Well, buffer overflows are nasty. This means that data belonging to some variable overflows into the variable allocated directly next to it. Implications are hard to predict.

I don't know what exactly that envvar changes, and where. From my limited knowledge, I'd assume that if this envvar exists means that each and everything within stock PASE has been adapted to support more than eight chars. And add-on software being compiled against the current set of system libraries should adhere to the envvar and thus be safe. I'd direct those questions to IBM. Only they have the source and can tell for sure.

But, other than those questions, you did help point out an existing thread where this was hashed over. I think I just stumbled over the old 'idea' I submitted regarding this while submitting another idea today.

Glad I could at least partly help :-)

:wq! PoC