UPPERCASE userids on AIX 3.1

[John F Haugh II]

In article <1991Jan27.203959.7401 at eplrx7.uucp> mroz at eplrx7.uucp (Peter Mroz) writes:
>Due to circumstances beyond my control, we are setting up some users on an
>IBM RS/6000 with userids that are ALL UPPERCASE.  These users are migrating
>from MVS and we are trying to make the transition as painless as possible.

You really don't want to do this.  Really.  AIX is a case sensitive
operating system, whereas MVS and VM are case insensitive.  With
VM it doesn't matter if you enter "COPY All NoteBook A OLD NOTEBOOK A",
but with AIX there is a difference between "All.Notebook" and "all.notebook"
and so on.  The commands are all lower case characters; your users will
have to either shift to lowercase once they login, or tolerate upper
case characters only on their screen.

>However, when I log in to one of these accounts I get a nasty message from
>the login program about turning off my caps lock.  We are connecting to
>the box with KI Research LAT.  As far as I know it just runs the login program

It is the login program.  The AIX login program has code which makes the
assumption that any user logging in with all upper case letters is not
able to enter lower case letters, therefore the user ID is case-shifted
downward, and the tty modes are set so that upper case letters are
converted to lower case letters on input, and lower case letters on output
are converted to upper case letters.

>I've logged in to other flavors of Unix and I don't get this message.  I can
>log in OK but I would prefer not to get "yelled" at.

This is actually done on quite a few versions of UNIX.  To try this out,
enter your user name IN ALL CAPS.  YOU SHOULD BE PROMPTED FOR "USER'S
\PASSWORD: ".  The \P is an uppercase P, with ASSWORD being in "lower"
case.

The case translation has been done on every version of UNIX I've used
since 1981.  It actually dates back into the 70's when there were 6 bit
terminals that didn't support lower case.

[ Disclaimer:  I speak only for myself.  UNIX and AIX are trademarks of
  their respective owners. ]
-- 
John F. Haugh II                             UUCP: ...!cs.utexas.edu!rpp386!jfh
Ma Bell: (512) 832-8832                           Domain: jfh at rpp386.cactus.org
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