username case

[Peter McCool]

Edward Schernau wrote:

>I've had several instances now on my mixed NT 3.51/4.0/Samba
>network where clients on Win boxes would enter a username
>such as "THisbites", and be denyed access.  The account in
>/etc/password was capitalized as "THisbites" and the NT
>domain account shows in User Manager as "THisbites".

Ahhhhh - someone else who uses mixed-case usernames on UNIX.
I believe samba forces usernames to lower case. This seems
to be the thing to do: sendmail and Cyrus IMAPd do the same thing, as
does netatalk(I'm told). It's probably simplest to avoid mixed-case
usernames
on UNIX: although mods to honour case aren't hard to do, it still ends up
being a lot of hassle.

Samba has a configuration option: username level. Setting it to 2 should
work in the example you mention above. See the man page for more details.

>Nonetheless, Samba refuses them access, and claims (on
>a debug level3 ) that there is no such user.

>Changing /etc/password to be "thisbites", i.e. all lowercase,
>makes it work.

>WHY?

Regards,

Peter