*BSD News Article 73304


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From: james@jraynard.demon.co.uk (James Raynard)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: UserID size
Date: 10 Jul 1996 01:17:57 -0000
Organization: A FreeBSD Box
Lines: 24
Message-ID: <4rv0c5$4ci@jraynard.demon.co.uk>
References: <4rt4mr$ah3@barracuda.pelican.net>
NNTP-Posting-Host: localhost
X-NNTP-Posting-Host: jraynard.demon.co.uk

In article <4rt4mr$ah3@barracuda.pelican.net>,
Stephen C. West-Fisher <steve@pelican.net> wrote:
>I'd like to try to modify FreeBSD to allow userids longer than 8
>characters.  I've looked around some and can't find where it's
>limiting them to 8 characters.  Could someone point me in the right
>direction?

This can be done, although quite as conveniently as you might
expect. The problem is a number of binaries (including a few you might
not have thought of) depend on this, so you basically need to remake
the whole lot. It may also cause problems if you use NIS to
communicate with non-FreeBSD machines.

Edit the line in /usr/src/include/utmp.h that says

#define UT_NAMESIZE     8

and do 'make world' in /usr/src. (Warning: this will take something
like 3-4 hours on a P166 with lots of RAM).

-- 
James Raynard, Edinburgh, Scotland
james@jraynard.demon.co.uk
http://www.freebsd.org/~jraynard/