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From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0) Description of problem: You can create a user with more than 16 caracteres but you cannot create a group. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Create a user /usr/sbin/useradd -d /home/user userwithalotofcaracteres id userwithalotofcaracteres ( user and group were created ) 2. Try to create a group /usr/sbin/groupadd userwithalotofcaracteres2 Invalid group name !! Actual Results: Cannot create the group Expected Results: It should create the group, since by using useradd it could create. Additional info: I had a crash in the system, since I had a huge number of users in one group ( I checked and this bug is already reported ). It erased important information from /etc/group. Trying to recreate the groups by using /usr/sbin/groupadd, I could recreate some of them and I had to insert them manually.
I hit the same error. The relevant error looks to be this one: Oct 13 11:55:47 pc5140 e-smith[3680]: groupadd: abc123abc-1-0-2-11 is a not a valid group name I delved into shadow-utils and found this code in chkname.c: int check_group_name(const char *name) { /* * Arbitrary limit for group names - max 16 * characters (same as on HP-UX 10). */ if (strlen(name) > 16) return 0; [...] Whereas the user code is: int check_user_name(const char *name) { #if HAVE_UTMPX_H struct utmpx ut; #else struct utmp ut; #endif /* * User names are limited by whatever utmp can * handle (usually max 8 characters). */ if (strlen(name) > sizeof(ut.ut_user)) return 0; [...] Where: struct utmpx { ... char ut_user[__UT_NAMESIZE]; /* Username. */ ... }; and #define __UT_NAMESIZE 32 I don't see any reason for the arbitrary 16 - groups names don't get logged to utmp in any case. I suggest bumping it to sizeof(ut.ut_user) (i.e. 32). Patch to follow after testing.
Note: The 16 character limit still appears in shadow-utils-4.0.3-15.src.rpm
Created attachment 105218 [details] Allow group names as long as user names instead of arbitrary 16
Patch attached. This works nicely for me on RH7.3
An advisory has been issued which should help the problem described in this bug report. This report is therefore being closed with a resolution of ERRATA. For more information on the solution and/or where to find the updated files, please follow the link below. You may reopen this bug report if the solution does not work for you. http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHBA-2005-164.html