Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 117663
ntalk max user name len is 12 chars
Last modified: 2015-03-04 20:13:37 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 Netscape/7.1 Description of problem: The ntalkd protocol allows a max user name of 12 chars long. (At least newer) RH allow more than that, rendering ntalk[d] useless for users with names > 12chars. I guess changing the protocol to allow longer user names makes it incompatible to previous ntalk[d] releases. Possibly a reason to remove ntalk[d] from future releases? Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): talk-server-0.17-21 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. $ useradd a_long_user_name 2. $ ssh -l a_long_user_name localhost 3. talk a_long_user_name@loclahost Actual Results: "User is not logged on" Additional info:
I don't consider this to be a crucial bug if at all as the protocol simply doesn't allow more than 12 chars for a username doesn't mean that therefore usernames with longer characters have to be forbidden. Additionally talk has not been of outmost importance over the last few years and is simply provided as is. So i'm closing this bug as wontfix as i can't fix the protocol (which would break it for interaction with any other Unix) nor can we disallow usernames with more than 12 chars. Read ya, Phil