P[username] accounts

Stephen Fisher (lithium@cia-g.com)
Sat, 14 Sep 1996 16:21:53 -0600 (MDT)

Hi.

I'm using radius to authenticate dial up users. Sort of recently I switched
my main server to FreeBSD from Linux. I have many users who have
user names of 8 characters, for them to login to PPP accounts they put a
capital "P" in front of the user name (there is a separate account in the
password file for these). Now that works fine on [my] Linux system since
it doesn't care about length of user names. However on FreeBSD there is a
limit of 8 characters, 8 character user names + a P make it 9. So I'm
still doing authentication on a Linux server.

I currently use a patch which starts PPP if there is a "P" at the
beginning of the username. All is well.

I have thought about applying the patch which takes the shell account and
uses it's password, and if there is a "P" in front or ".ppp" (or something
similar) it starts a PPP session. Without the need for a separate
account.

However, not all of my users have PPP accounts, so I'm looking for some
way to let only the PPP/Shell users use shell AND PPP. Ideas anyone?
There are multiple ways I could do it, using external databases and such,
I would rather not do this right now though.

TIA.

- Steve
- Systems Manager
- Community Internet Access
- http://www.cia-g.com