[Samba] NT4 to Samba 3 domain transfer

[John H Terpstra]

On Tuesday 01 November 2005 11:22, Doug VanLeuven wrote:
> John H Terpstra wrote:
> > On Tuesday 01 November 2005 01:54, Charles Zealey wrote:
> >>I'm in the process of following John's excellent instructions for
> >>transfering an NT4 domain to Samba 3.0.20 running on 2.6.9-gentoo-r6 on
> >>an Intel box.
> >>
> >>Most things seem to work fine apart from the transfer of the machine
> >>accounts.  These do not get moved because as retrieved from the NT
> >>server the name is in upper case and adduser refuses to add names in
> >>upper case, so I get the message 'unable to add posix account'.  I
> >>presume that adding in lower case will work just as well but there are
> >>rather a lot of them and I'd prefer the automated approach.
> >>
> >>Has anyone solved this before me?
> >
> > Congratulations - you have been bitten by the paranoid shadow tools.
> > Someone made the great decision that no *n*x account should be in upper
> > case.
>
> Goes all the way back to the days of teletypwriters and occasional dumb
> serial terminals that only knew uppercase.
> If the login name came thru to getty all uppercase, than for the
> session, uppercase was mapped to lowercase.  This allowed a person to
> move around logging in from hi-tech upper/lower case terminals and stupid
> uppercase only terminals as the same user.  IBM terminals were a big
> offender back then.  Hollerith to EBCDIC.
>
> This probably ought to retire, but it's so implicit in so much legacy code.

Everything you say is right on! However, the decision to implement this severe 
limitation at a late stage in the game is inexcusable in my opinion.

Why should we suddenly be bitten by a new policy that permits no uppercase 
characters and no spaces in user and group names? This was a bad decision 
that enforces an unnecessary constraint. I am glad it has been reverted as it 
was a silly decision to do this.

- John T.