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Re: Re: username should be lower-case for $USER
First -
On 1/9/07, Igor Peshansky wrote:
On Tue, 9 Jan 2007, DePriest, Jason R. wrote:
>
> $USER is a Windows environment variable and Cygwin doesn't change it.
> It just reports what Windows says.
Not true. $USER is actually a shell variable, and is (re)set by the shell
(bash, ash, tcsh, what have you). You must be thinking of $USERNAME,
which is a Windows variable.
Yes, you are exactly correct. I goobered that and I am glad you
caught it and put it out there so at least the archives will reflect
the truth.
Next -
On 1/9/07, Irwin, Doug wrote:
As covered later in this thread the user is logging into a domain.
Windows is indeed case insensitive
WRT logins and can even be forced into case insensitive mode for
passwords programatically (as
demonstrated by the l0phtcrack algorithm). But I have never seen a
DOMAIN report the user id back in
lowercase, even when it was specifically entered in lower case (I may be
wrong about this - please let
me know if you have contrary evidence).
If the user ID is created with lower-cased letters, it will be stored
and reported in lower-cased letters. At least that is how the Windows
2003 Active Directory where I work expresses its user IDs.
For example, our regular IDs are a number. Some special IDs have
letters added to the beginning of the number.
I am looking at user IDs right now through the AD User and Computers
mmc snap-in and I can see that most of them are in all caps, but some
are not. No matter how I look at the account name for this particular
ID, it is in lower-cased letters.
The reported 'dn' of objects with lower-cased letters have lower-cased
letters in them, so AD will use that to report the values.
I also know that when you initially log on to a system and it creates
a new user profile for you, the folder it creates will have upper /
lower -cased letters based on how you logged on and not on how AD says
your ID should be capitalized.
There is another workaround, tho! In my environment I log into the
domain with a login in the form
"AA9999", but need my Cygwin environment to recognise me as "sybase".
So I simply edited the
leading column of my record in /etc/passwd and changed the contents
"sybase". Since the other tokens
linking me record to the domain account were unchanged Cygwin sees me as
"sybase", but the domain sees
me as myself. This has been working for well over a year. If anyone
sees any problems with it I'd
be glad to hear form them.
-doug
----------------------------------------
This is of course the new best answer to the problem and is something
I also routinely do (mostly to distinguish between groups that are in
different domains but would otherwise have the same name).
I have no idea why it wasn't suggested earlier unless we all just
thought he had probably already tried that.
-Jason
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