FAQ How to change a userid

[Rob Siemborski]

On Mon, 30 Jun 2003, twk wrote:

> > Then Why Cant I similarly  rename
> >      'user/username ----> user/newusername '
>
> Because you can't. It's an architectural limitation of Cyrus.

This isn't true.  Its certainly possible, its just quite laborous to do
correctly.

> Here is what we do :
>
> - Create a new account (new)
> - cp -r /imap/user/o/old/* /imap/user/n/new
> - reconstruct -r user.new
> - delete old account
>
> I wouldn't consider that particularly laborious.

Except you haven't renamed the user, you've just renamed the mailbox.

To rename the user you need to also do the following:

1. move the subscriptions, seen state & sieve scripts (ok, this isn't
hard)
2. change the ACLs on all the mailboxes so that the old username is
replaced by the new username (this is quite intensive to do on a large
mail store)
3. update the group memberships (since cyrus doesn't control its own
group memberships, this involves the use of an outside process somehow).

There is an 'allowusermoves' option in 2.2 that does some of this, but (2)
and (3) just can't be done in any efficient way using the current scheme
(We have thought about using numberic uids for users, but that would be a
significant architechural shift).

-Rob

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Rob Siemborski * Andrew Systems Group * Cyert Hall 207 * 412-268-7456
Research Systems Programmer * /usr/contributed Gatekeeper