[CentOS] How to create user with period (.)

[Benjamin Smith]

On Thursday 02 March 2006 19:00, John Hinton wrote:
> Anyway, in a virtual hosting environment, the last thing you want to do 
> is make the mistake of assigning anyone a username such as info, games, 
> webmaster, postmaster, accounting and so on because if you do, they'll 
> get all mail to info destined for any domain on the machine which does 
> not have a info@ address. 

Towards this end, I've long had a convention of: 

1) all accounts get a 2-4 char id that's semi-descriptive. EG: "Western Oak 
Cabinets" might get "woc"

2) All UIDs created to satisfy that customer account get prepended with that 
id, then an underscore. Eg: "woc_info". 

This makes it very easy to parse /etc/passwd with a script and tie it to the 
accounting system with a regex and a few hashes in Perl/PHP/Python. Orphaned 
accounts are thus almost completely transparent, since they just won't match 
up to a list of currently paying customer accounts. 

3) An virtusertable entry is created pointing the 
"info at westernoakcabinets.com" to "woc_info". 

All this is administered by some scripts (and some rote habit) established 
years ago. This has nothing particularly to do with websites, so your example 
of "http://my_site.com" has never come up as an issue. 

-Ben 
-- 
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."
- XEROX PARC slogan, circa 1978