SSH and the case-sensitive username in Snow Leopard

almost the dumbest article ever. Unix is notoriously case sensitive, and apparently Apple has just gotten around to fixing this lapse. Poor practice on the user's part shouldn't be considered an OS issue. If you know enough Unix to ssh (and you can always ssh -l $USER) then you should know about case sensitivity.

I was interested to see how many commenters (a) failed to grasp the poster's simple point, and (b) rushed in to be all condescending.

Free advice: Brush up on your reading comprehension skills. Do it as a New Year's gift to the rest of tuaw's readers, who are, you know, smart?

/rant against ninnies

It never would have occurred to me SSH allowed "Aron" for "aron". Coming from a UNIX background, it's standard for case sensitivity to always be honored. Anyone who assumes otherwise is asking for trouble.

Aron, I am surprised you haven't encountered problems before having a short name using more than lowercase letters. ACMT training use to say to never use more than lowercase letters for usernames as there were many problems that could be encountered. Last time I had my certification was tiger.

Just some advice, stick with lower case.

You guys are yelling at him and saying his credibility is hosed because he's waiting to upgrade a mission-critical system that's already stable and functional because he's afraid of undocumented changes destabilizing it? I hope I never work where you run IT.

Since Apple didn't document the change, the only way to find out about it is for it to break something that worked in 10.5. That's Aron's complaint about 10.6 - for him, there's too many _undocumented_ changes, whether for good or bad, in 10.6 for him to trust it with mission-critical services.

You didn't have a problem? That's great, good for you. Is it a PEBKAC on Aron? Because of the lack of documentation, not really. He may not be following "best practices in computing," but by not documenting a fundamental change to how a critical system utility works, neither is Apple. That's the point of this post, which looks like it went straight over everybody's head.

In 10.5, was Aron logging in using 'Aron' or 'aron'? I know case sensitivity wasn't introduced until 10.6, I'm trying to find out if the problem was self inflicted. Because if he was logging in using 'Aron' in 10.5, and then failed authentication in 10.6 because 'Aron' is different from 'aron', then the failure lies with himself. PEBKAC.

Best practices in computing say you should always assume the system supports case sensitivity, will have problems with special characters and spaces, and may even choke on too many characters. Keep your usernames, passwords, and folder/file names as clutter free a possible and you won't run into these upgrade woes.

Hey, I agree this shouldn't prevent a techie from upgrading but it is a helpful tip. I couldn't figure out why I couldn't ssh from my iPhone to my iMac using air sharing. This tip helped me...I tried proper case and it worked.

Wait, they aren't case sensitive in 10.5?! Now THAT'S what I see as the big problem here!

I've never commented before but this story was so stupid that I actually took the effort to leave a comment.

You held off upgrading to 10.6 because you couldn't be bothered to hold the shift key and the "a" key at the same time. I thought people who knew how to use SSH were supposed to be smart. :[

I think this is a valid TuawTip and while it isn't an exhilarating story, I am sure it will help some people troubleshoot their issues.

I use X11 for my SSH connection to a Linux cluster and just assumed case sensitivity was required.