Unix userid conventions

[Henry Mensch]

djfiander at watnot.UUCP (David Fiander) wrote: 
->I don't see how having cryptic userids does anything but make it difficult
->to communicate through the obvious medium of electronic mail.

Well, sometimes it helps the people who run the place (often these
people are called "bean-counters") keep track of what's going on
without expending much effort.  Some time ago, when I worked in the
Midwest, I was assigned a login name of "ag5".  This had nothing to do
with security--instead, it seems that these ridiculous login names
(yes, they were all three-character login names) mapped to account
names on an archaic system on which the bean-counting (and lots of
other miscellaneous batch processing) was performed.  These login names
were automatically generated, although it seems that (now) if you kiss
the appropriate bottoms there you can get your initials as a login
name.

Nevertheless, I think you're right.  Cryptic login names make things
difficult for the user, and if a cracker wants in, (s)he'll get in
whether the login names are obvious or not.

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Henry Mensch                           <henry at garp.mit.edu> 
       {ames,cca,rochester,mit-eddie}!garp!henry