[Samba] NT4 to Samba 3 domain transfer

[Charles Zealey]

John H Terpstra wrote:

>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.
>  
>
I fear I'm old enough to remember upper case logins.....

So simply moding the adduser script to change uc to lc will do the job?

I'll give it a go.


Richard