/etc/passwd/ASXX entries

Hi guys.  We discovered something interesting regarding /etc/passwd and
/bin/mail.  It turns out that the man page for /etc/passwd says
that all user login names must be lower case.  

Now, when we had all the software running on mole.merit.edu, everything 
worked great.  We had user names of the form "ASXX" and mail destined
for these accounts (ie. generated by cleandb) found its way just great.
However, when we moved things to fox.merit.edu, we ran into mail problems.
(The reason that the problems only became evident today is another story.)

As we all know, the way UNIX mail works is that sendmail receives a msg
addressed to "ASXXX" and, if it is a local address, hands the msg off to
the local mailer.  In this case the local mailer is /bin/mail.  /bin/mail
takes to msg, parses the address to extract the user name, looks up the user 
name in /etc/passwd to verify that (s)he does in fact exist, and then writes 
the msg to /usr/spool/mail/<username>.

Well, the version of /bin/mail running on fox.merit.edu (which is much
newer than the version on mole.merit.edu) seems to fold the case of the
user name before looking up the entry in /etc/passwd.  Thus, even though user 
ASXXX has an entry in /etc/passwd, mail destined to ASXXX at fox.merit.edu cannot 
be delivered because /bin/mail is looking for user "asXXX".

Have you guys had any problems of this type before?  Can you think of any 
things that might break if we change all our user account names to be
lower case?


Thanks for any info!

-Andy



-------- Logged at  Thu Apr 28 21:58:57 MET DST 1994  ---------