Welcome to Geeklog, Anonymous Thursday, March 28 2024 @ 11:06 am EDT

Geeklog Forums

Risk of lengthening gl_uid (mediumint(8) -> int(10))


Status: offline

maran

Forum User
Junior
Registered: 07/17/02
Posts: 18
Hello, and thanks in advance to anyone that can help.

I am the webmaster at Ithaca College. We have been struggling to find a way to use Geeklog, but integrate it into our college's LDAP directory for user information and authentication. Our goal is always to avoid any customization.

I have a script that re-populates the gl_users table nightly, and have set the 'uid' field to the person's college_id number so that it will always be unique and consistent. However, it turns out the mediumint('8') designation is too short to accommodate those.

The only solution we can think of is to change all the uid columns to int(10) which will solve our problem completely. I suspect there is possible risk in doing this though, as upgrades happen.

Can anyone speak to what those risks might be? If a dev could chime in that would be wonderful.

Thank you for your help.
Benjamin
(geeklog user since there was one)
 Quote

Status: offline

vinny

Site Admin
Admin
Registered: 06/24/02
Posts: 352
Location:Colorado, USA
I don't see any problem from changing size of the uid. I haven't seen anything in the code that depends on the uid being a certain length.

I'm assuming that the college_id number isn't their SSN. The uid for users is visible in many instances to site visitors (including anonymous users) and this could cause some concerns for privacy and identify theft...

-Vinny
 Quote

Status: offline

maran

Forum User
Junior
Registered: 07/17/02
Posts: 18
Thanks vinny,

Yeah - we stopped using the SSN a couple years ago - the proprietary ID is also 9-digits though. I appreciate your input.

Benjamin
 Quote

All times are EDT. The time is now 11:06 am.

  • Normal Topic
  • Sticky Topic
  • Locked Topic
  • New Post
  • Sticky Topic W/ New Post
  • Locked Topic W/ New Post
  •  View Anonymous Posts
  •  Able to post
  •  Filtered HTML Allowed
  •  Censored Content