username case

Peter Samuelson peter at cadcamlab.org
Sat Mar 11 06:33:29 GMT 2000


[Peter McCool]
> 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.

Yes indeed.

Unix usernames are case-sensitive, NT usernames are not.  Now, I'm all
in favor of case-sensitivity in (nearly) all things, but I think this
is a case of compatibility with inferior systems and practices.
Sendmail converts names to lowercase for a very good reason: much of
the world assumes that email addresses are not case-sensitive.
(Indeed, the hostname is not, but RFC822 allows the implementation to
define whether the username is.)  Samba should (and does) do the same,
especially since some clients (Win311, I believe) send the wrong case.
(I.e. if everything were case-sensitive you couldn't use those clients
without having all your usernames in uppercase.)

(another) Peter


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