Samba Fails to Split GECOS on Comma

[Richard Laager]

Pulling up the Start Menu on a Windows XP machine joined to a Samba PDC
shows, for example, "Richard Laager,,," as the full name. This is
because the GECOS field on the server contains commas, apparently added
by chfn(1). Samba should stop at the first comma.

[Chuck Short (zulcss)]

Thanks for the bug report.

[Richard Laager (rlaager)]

I don't know why you think this is a duplicate of bug #289299. That sounds like a completely separate issue. This bug here is about how Samba does not properly parse the GECOS field that it gets (perhaps indirectly) from /etc/passwd.

[Dave Gomboc (davegomboc)]

I wouldn't want to cause a worse problem than the annoyance I'd be solving. Would editing /etc/passwd to remove the three commas be an effective workaround for this problem?

If not, what would be an effective workaround?

[Richard Laager (rlaager)]

semi-newbie: Yes, just delete the commas. They'll come back when you use certain tools to make certain edits, but you can just remove them again.

[Dave Gomboc (davegomboc)]

I attempted to use the prescribed workaround (editing /etc/passwd to remove the ,,, after the name), but this did not work for me. I don't see any change (I still get "User Name,,," in the Start Menu under Windows XP.

[JMalone (jmalone)]

I've noticed this issue as well. There is a bug report on samba's bugzilla: http://www.samba.org/samba/docs/man/manpages-3/smbd.8.html

Looks pretty stagnant. I'm trying my hand at solving this and proposed a possible solution there. Please look at it and let me know if you have any comment/suggestions or if I'm way off base. I don't have a good environment to test it out either so if you're able to try it (not in a production environment) please do.

[JMalone (jmalone)]

Oops....the url I posted above is dead wrong. The samba bug report is at https://bugzilla.samba.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5198

[JMalone (jmalone)]

There is a patch for this bug now available at https://bugzilla.samba.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5198 . Please note that this fix doesn't affect existing samba user accounts, only newly created ones. To fix existing accounts you should use 'pdbedit' to correct the full name fields for existing users.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package samba - 2:3.4.5~dfsg-2ubuntu4

---------------
samba (2:3.4.5~dfsg-2ubuntu4) lucid; urgency=low

  * debian/patches/ubuntu-gecos-fix.patch: Fix gecos parsing backported
    from Samba 3.5.x. (LP: #182572)
 -- Chuck Short <email address hidden> Wed, 03 Mar 2010 09:35:26 -0500