gecos from AD? (was Re: timeout in LDAP access)

[Corinna Vinschen]

On Jun 18 00:59, Denis Excoffier wrote:
> On 2014-06-17 12:30, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> > On Jun 17 12:00, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> >> On Jun 16 22:39, Denis Excoffier wrote:
> >>> Another (unrelated and less important) problem is that 'getent'
> >>> happily produces lines with some extra ‘:’, in particular when the
> >>> gecos field itself contains ‘:’.
> >> 
> >> Wow, that *is* important.  All fields returned from the server have to
> >> get their colons converted to commas.  I'll fix that.
> > 
> > While we're at it... do we really need the gecos info?  Cygwin fills
> > out this field with the Windows username and SID info for internal
> > purposes, and then adds the gecos info from AD.  However, it's just
> > informational and usually only used by the finger(1) tool.
> The gecos field from AD seems to be _prepended_ (not appended) to the
> username + SID.

Right, I just wasn't going for details.  The content of gecos is added
to the pw_gecos field, one way or another.

> In any case, it may represent some information with
> high added value (like user real name or e-mail address, depending on
> local rules of course). I would not vote for removing it.
> 
> Why is it so clear that the ‘:’ should be replaced by a comma? Here, we
> have situations where it contains something
> like « Owner: Albert Einstein ». An underscore could be more appropriate.

The point is, the colon must be replaced with some other ASCII char.
I'm pretty sure this doesn't deserve another nsswitch.conf setting.
So we just choose *some* ASCII char and be done with it.  I don't like
the underscore but maybe space is ok.  Or semicolon.

> There is something more important: i’ve written in one of my previous
> messages that when ‘:’ occurs in gecos, the resulting ‘passwd’ file under
> ‘getent’ will contain more ‘:’ than expected, but this is incorrect. In fact
> (and i would like someone to try it), when ‘:’ is found within the
> gecos field, ‘getent’ does not show the last (homedir) field, and
> the count of ‘:’ is still correct. The problem might not be in getent after
> all.

Sure.  It's all occuring inside the Cygwin DLL.


Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Maintainer                 cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat
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