Extending pw(8) username limit

[Chuck Swiger]

On Apr 14, 2011, at 2:20 PM, Ryan Coleman wrote:
> I have a special situation where I'd like to do either first.last_somedomain.com or first.last at somedomain.com but the former is rejected due to length and the latter due to the "@" by pw(8).
> 
> How do I extend this from 16 chars to 32 or 64? I have been finding it difficult to find explicit details on this.

>From prior experience, your users are going to loathe ("hate" isn't strong enough) 16+ character usernames.

If the problem is that you want to setup email aliases mapping (eg) charles.swiger, charles_swiger, chuck.swiger, etc, etc to cswiger, the mail aliases file supports that just fine.  And if you want to support users in multiple domains, the /etc/passwd database is just not the place to do it.  Consider SASL, LDAP, or even NIS+; and SASL in particular integrates very smoothly with multi-domain email via Cyrus, Dovecot, etc.

Regards,
-- 
-Chuck