[gdm-list] Separate username and password fields

[mike _ <arizonagroovejet gmail com>]

I was looking though the logs of some of the machines I administer the
other day and noticed several entries that said words to the effect of
"Login failed no so user xxxxxxxx' where xxxxxxxx was a string of
characters which is obviously someone's password.

It's easy to figure out what's happened here. GDM provides a single
field for entering the username and then the password. Somehow a
machine has been left with the field to set to password (these
machines are in a student workarea) and someone has sat down, typed
their username in to the password prompt then subsequently typed their
password in to the username prompt.

A response I've seen given to other people asking about separate
username and password fields is to use the face browser so the users
can click the icon for their user and then enter their password. My
machines are configured to authenticate against my organisation's
central directory which contains ~30000 users so face browser is not
an option.


I've never liked that GDM only shows one field. I have on occasion
started to type my username in only to then notice it's coming up in
dots because the prompt to the side actually reads Password, but my
research indicates that there is no way to configure to GDM to display
separate fields for username and password. Which is a shame. Given
that having only one field can evidently cause confusion I'd like to
ask the developers to consider adding a configuration option to
display separate username and password fields. I feel that is much
more user friendly than using a single field.