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

[Denis Excoffier]

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. 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.

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.

Regards,

Denis Excoffier.
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