[K12OSN] compound names stopping gnome logins

[Petre Scheie]

Unless things have changed (and they may have), having a space in a user ID was never 
allowed in Unix/Linux.  Stay away from other punctuation characters, too, if you want to 
avoid problems.

Petre

john wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I have one that I hope you can help me with. While most of our students 
> have sane user names in the lastname_firstname format, some of our 
> student users have compound user names like:
> 
> user van_user . It just so happens that this user is having trouble 
> logging in to the Gnome desktop.
> These compound names don't seem to cause problems if students log in via 
> the command line. When the student trys to login in via GDM they get the 
> following message:
> 
> "Please contact your system administrator to resolve the following problem:
> Could not resolve the address "xml.readwrite:/home/Students/user 
> van_user/.gconf" in the configuration file /etc/gconf/2/path": Couldn't 
> resolve address for configuration source: Bad address 
> `xml:readwrite:/home/Students/user van_user/.gconf':  ` ' is an invalid 
> character in a configuration storage address"
> 
> Is the problem the compound name? Where did that final ' come from on 
> xml:readwrite:/home/Students/user van_user/.gconf' ?
> 
> I hope someone here can point me in the right direction.
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> John
> 
> 
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