[unisog] ID Recycling: Yes/No?

[Michael Holstein]

> 1 - What is the current ID scheme that is being used (fullname;
> lastname,firstname; first-initial,middle-initial,lastname, etc) and max
> length of IDs

UserID != emailID

For UserID, it's numerical, and has nothing to do with SSN, etc. At the 
moment, these are 7 digits long (we started at 1000000) and created when 
somebody is either accepted or hired -- and students/staff use the same 
scheme, although they end up in different parts of the LDAP tree.

Email IDs are automatically created as firstinitial.lastname@, and for 
collisions, they start to look like AOL addresses 
(firstinitial.lastnameXX@ .. where XX starts at 01 and works up).

Note that my email address dosen't follow this because I didn't want 
'03' after my name, so I had them make mine firstname.lastname. Email 
address isn't a primary key anywhere.

> 3 - Are IDs recycled (reused after a period of time)? 

No.

> 	2b - If you are not recycling IDs, is there technical reasons
> (server limitations, etc) or a social obstacles (the VP wants his ID to
> match his name, regardless of who had it before)

By not using email addresses as a primary ID key, we avoid this problem 
entirely.

We did, however, unintentionally introduce another problem -- 
specifically that we are having fits getting cross-platform 
authentication since (most) *nix dosen't like usernames to start with a 
number. This really hasn't been a big issue since admin-level accounts 
are created in the directory manually, using a different scheme.

Cheers,

Michael Holstein CISSP GCIA
Cleveland State University