Date: Mon, 25 Nov 2013 18:39:50 +0000
AMMRL;
Although there is a rather involved workaround (see buglist: username.j2201 below) that does work for a single user on a particular workstation, it is not suitable for larger installations with multiple usernames unless you have a lot of extra time on your hands. The long and short of it is that Agilent is working on the problem and WILL NOT patch VNMRJ 3.2 for Mercuries and Inovas . They are expending their energies into VNMRJ 4.X MI which is soon to be in beta test. In the meantime we at UF Chemistry NMR will continue to use the gatorlink (UFAD) usernames where they are 8 characters or less and truncate the others. I will message the users group and determine how many are not in compliance for future reference.
username - Length limit problematic in LDAP environment
Bug-ID
username.j2201
Description
All our users have pre-existing LDAP accounts. I have configured our RedHat boxes to use LDAP login and made a few minor changes to makeuser and a few other scripts so that the vnmrsys directory is always on the local machine (i.e., a local home folder, e.g. /home/user1/vnmrsys etc. in addition to the network home located at $HOME). This all works fine and is not the purpose of the bug report. Rather, Linux and LDAP do not have the archaic 8 character user name restriction. Given that I'm tying into an existing LDAP network, many of my users have user names longer than 8 chars. To demonstrate that the 8 char user name limit is artificial, one can comment out lines 180 - 181 in bin/makeuser and run
makeuser reallylongusername /home nmr y
from the command line. Everything is created fine without any errors. However, with VnmrJ 2.2C and 2.2D the user must be created in vnmrj adm or converted to a VnmrJ user. Such long user name users do not show up in the "convert user" dialog, and using the "new user" dialog, I get a
username with x letters exceeds UNIX limit of 8
error. I have searched through all bash scripts and this appears to be coming from within Java or a precompiled C library. I poked around a bit in the SQL databases and it doesn't appear to be those that require the 8 character limit. If it's possible to remove this artificial limit (at least for Linux) that would be great.
Update: This issue persists up to and including VnmrJ 2.3A and VnmrJ 3.2 / RHEL 5.3; for a lengthy workaround see below.
Note: the workaround below has received only limited testing, it really is meant for admins / experienced users only.
Category: general
Patch level: 107,404,cp4 (VnmrJ 2.2C) / VnmrJ 2.2D unpatched
Bad_Versions
VnmrJ 2.2C - 3.2 / OS? / DirectDrive/UNITY INOVA
Fixed_Version
Reported_by
Scott Burt, Brigham Young University (2009-05-29)
Confirmed_by
Eric Condamine, IBS Grenoble; Mauro Cremonini, Agilent; Alan Ronemus, SSCI, a Division of Aptuit
Priority_Rating
P2 (high)
Status
Open
Workaround
Mauro Cremonini started with editing /vnmr/bin/makeuser by looking for the lines
if [ $namelen -gt 8 ]
then
echo "User name with $namelen letters exceeds UNIX limit of 8"
return 1
fi
and commenting out the line return 1, changing it to
#return 1
As root, on a shell command line, use
makeuser long_user_name
The next steps shold be done as user vnmr1, from a shell window: first, call
createuser long_user_name
Then, in /vnmr/adm/users/profiles/system, create a file long_user_name with the content
update Yes
home /home/long_user_name
name Users_real_name
access all
itype Spectroscopy
owned /home/long_user_name
then, create /vnmr/adm/users/profiles/user/long_user_name with the content
appdir Spectroscopy
accname long_user_name
sysdir /vnmr
operators
userdir /home/long_user_name/vnmrsys
datadir /home/long_user_name/vnmrsys/data \
/home/long_user_name/vnmrsys/parlib \
/home/long_user_name/vnmrsys/shims
Add the name long_user_name to the single-line text file /vnmr/adm/users/userlist ; then, call the command
echo "long_user_name `date` active" >> /vnmr/adm/uexist
Now, vnmrj adm shows long_user_name with all relevant data: update the new user long_user_name in vnmrj adm - and now, VnmrJ 3.2 runs just fine for the new user.
Severity
3 (Inconvenient)
Remarks
Suggested feature
Workaround provided
=====================================================================================================
I'll tried it out and it works! Thanks to Piotr Dobrowolski (Agilent) and Scott Burt
Robert Harker
https://spinsights.chem.agilent.com/welcome is an excellent resource and should be the go-to area for Varian/Agilent sites. I've discussed this in there as well.
Special thanks to Josh, Scott, David, Craig & of course Piotr
Robert Harker
From: Harker,Robert A [mailto:rharker_at_chem.ufl.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, October 30, 2013 3:40 PM
To: ammrl_at_ammrl.org
Cc: Bailey, Dwight
Subject: AMMRL: =)> Linux based VNMRJ & Maximum username length/ Active Directory Authentication
Dear AMMRL;
We here at UF are being encouraged to authenticate our 150+ VNMRJ user database through our universities Microsoft Active Directory (UFAD). We are using Dell T3500's and VNMRJ 3.2.
One problem is that usernames on UFAD can be much longer than the VNMRJ mandated 8 characters which is UNIX legacy. Many UF usernames are similar to tester.user which is legal in both LINUX and the Active Directory but illegal in VNMRJ. LINUX defaults to a maximum of 32 characters and I found the lines of code in the makeuser script where it specifies the maximum length of the username to 8.
if [ $namelen -gt 8 ]
then
echo "User name with $namelen letters exceeds UNIX limit of 8"
return 1
fi
I tried changing this to a number greater than 8 and tried using the VNMRJ Admin to create a user with a longer username and it fails with the above error regardless. Does anybody in the NMR community have a workaround or solution to this problem? Does VNMRJ Admin use another version of makeuser that is not in /vnmr/bin or does it now use another script? If we can create longer usernames then we can sync and authenticate with our UFAD and user administration would be much easier since these UFAD accounts are deactivated after the person leaves ... then we'd be able to purge accounts automatically.
Also we have been able to create 8 character or less LINUX users that authenticate on our UFAD but we cannot make the accounts into VNMRJ users. VNMRJ does not populate on the desktop.
Thanks in advance and I will collate and summarize the responses later.
Robert Harker
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