Oops!!!, My mistake. I somehow read the following text and thought it to be related to the kernel.
Here's the extract :
The latest linux distributions do not allow having a "." in username. In this case, the above script will fail with "useradd: invalid user name" error. The only solution I have found so far to get around this problem, is to create a regular user, then edit /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow and change the username to a domain manually. For example, if your domain is mail.domain.com, you could add a user "mail" first (useradd -d /home/email/mail.domain.com -g email -m mail), then edit /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow and change the username "mail" to "mail.domain.com". I don't know why useradd was changed not to allow usernames with dots (duh). As you can see, there is a way to get around that anyway.
http://megaz.arbuz.com/?p=qmail_howto
On Thursday 07 August 2003 09:43, Philip S Tellis wrote:
On Wed, 6 Aug 2003, Vinayakam Murugan wrote:
Are you sure about Debian? Coz while googling, I came across an article which said that the latest kernel doesn't support this.
The kernel has nothing to do with usernames. This is handled by the shell. Where did you read this?
Philip
-- Immortality -- a fate worse than death. -- Edgar A. Shoaff