[ADVANCE NOTICE] usernames limited to 8 chars gonna be nasty..

[Peter Samuelson]

  [Jeremy Allison]
> > That's the idea behind winbindd, coming in Samba 3.0 for UNIXes
> > that have an nsswitch module.

[David Champion]
> Is there some place I can read about this?  I assume that by
> "nsswitch module" you mean a modular nameservice switch.  I don't
> think I have any modules which implement the switch.  If that's not
> correct, I'd like to know.

nsswitch is a mechanism for modular user/group/etc enumeration.  That
is, a nsswitch-enabled libc will implement several calls such as
get{pw,gr}*() and gethostby*() in terms of loadable modules.  It's the
"other half" of replacing /etc/{passwd,group,shadow,...} with other
sources of this information -- the first half being PAM, which
implements authentication and session management.  Unlike PAM, nsswitch
uses the original Unix API, so (theoretically) no application changes
are required.

Solaris, Linux and other Unices support nsswitch.  AIX seems to have a
nsswitch-like mechanism but I haven't looked too closely at it.  

Peter