Re: netID lengths

[Charlie Derr <cderr () SIMONS-ROCK EDU>]

On 08/16/2013 10:33 AM, Shalla, Kevin wrote:
> We’re in the midst of changing the process for assigning new netIDs, and one consideration is the length of usernames
> allowed in various systems. We’ve currently got a maximum length of 8, and given that our plan is to never reuse 
> netIDs,
> that maximum causes challenges to maintaining uniqueness and having reasonable netIDs without embedded numerals. We’re
> considering increasing that to 24 characters.
>
>  
>
> What maximum length do you have for netIDs?

Ours are generated by appending first initial to last name (and students get an additional appended two digits (the year
they entered)), so the real constraining factor is the length of surnames.  Our tiny size (compared to almost all the
rest of you) means we don't often have clashes (and can manually solve them by modifying the ID when they rarely occur).

We used to truncate at 8 characters.  Now we just go ahead and create full-length no matter how long the last name,
which can be pretty long (though we've not yet come across multiple levels of hyphenation).  I was just curious, so I
checked and our longest ID is currently 20 characters.

On a semi-related topic, I modified some code a few years ago to increase our maximum password length substantially
after running into a login problem with a student that had set a password dozens of characters long (this is definitely
behavior we wanted to support and encourage).

    best,
         ~c


>  
>
> What is the maximum username length supported in most systems? Some cursory web searches gave me these numbers:
>
> Windows 256
>
> Linux 32
>
> Oracle 30
>
> MySQL 16
>
> SQL Server 128
>
>  
>
> Kevin Shalla
>
> Academic and Enrollment Services
>
> University of Illinois at Chicago
>
>