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

["Christoph H. Hochstaetter" <christoph@hochstaetter.de>]

On Jun 17 14:52, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
>On Jun 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.
>
>On second thought, removing colons should only occur for gecos.
>The other fields shouldn't contain colons anyway since their
>content has to be POSIX-compatible anyway.
>
>So, either I add code to remove the colons from the gecos field ...
>
>
>> 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.
>>
>> Shall I just remove fetching the gecos fields from AD entirely?
>
>... or that.
See http://www.manpages.info/freebsd/passwd.5.html

"This information is used by the finger(1) program, and the first field
used by the system mailer "

Some mail program might want to use the gecos field as a friendly name
in the from: field. Thus the gecos field should start with the user's full
name and then a comma (at least when retrieved with getpwnam(3)
but getpwent(3) would be great too). Whether the name comes from
the gecos field in AD or any other source (e.g. some other AD field)
doesn't seem to make a difference for me.

-Christoph

--
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple