[Samba] Fedora Core 3 and Samba

[Paul Espinosa]

Over the last week I've upgraded one of my samba servers to FC3.  I ran into
some problems joining XP machines to the domain.  Tracing back the problem
I've found that FC3 has changed the behavior of the useradd/adduser script. 
It will no longer allow a UNIX account to be added to the system that has a
'$' in it.  I've verified this behavior by trying it at the command line, it
doesn't work there and give the error:

	root at server(~): useradd newer\$
	useradd: invalid user name 'newer$

Upon speculation we believe this might be to bring Fedora/Redhat user utils
in line with POSIX standards.  Under POSIX this is the Portable Filename
Charcterset which is as follows:

    ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
    abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
    0123456789._-

Notice no '$'.  But the standard goes on to say extended characters are
allowed, but it will result in noncompliant use...

This is behaving this way on a test server and the latest Redhat ES (running
on our production server) still works fine.  But I'm concerned that they'll
move ES/AS etc. to behaving the same way.

If this is a direction that Redhat moves to, and possibly other
distributions (assuming it's truly POSIX standards driving this), this seems
like it may have a big impact on Samba when trying to add a machine to the
domain.

I don't know if this is something Fedora/Redhat has done on purpose or by
accident, but it seems to hurt Samba.

Any help or info would be appreciated.

-- 
Paul Espinosa
pespinosa at sunflowerbroadband.com
IT Supervisor
The World Company
785/312-6912