kern.ngroups question

[Michael Vince]

Julian Elischer wrote:
> Reuben A. Popp wrote:
>> Hello all,
>>
>> Can someone explain to me the rationale behind having ngroups_max set 
>> to 16 by default?
>>
>
> NFS only supports this much by default (from memory).
>
> Samba (in the guise of Jeremy Allison)
> has asked us to follow Linux's lead and support an arbitrary number of 
> Groups
> but it hasn't happened yet, Partly due to the question of "what to do 
> about NFS" and partly just due to ENOTIME.
I think at the very least that there should be some more obvious 
warnings about this potentially serious limitation in either release 
notes of FreeBSD and or Samba.

I just had to deal with this limitation and it was quite annoying to say 
the least, it appears Samba is somewhat deliberately designed to give 
you a hard time when you run into this limit, because as soon as you add 
a user to more than 16 groups it declares the group file unreadable and 
as a security measure shuts down all shares and authentication which 
wrecks a network which relies on Samba.

Also as far as I know Solaris and Linux has long gone past this limitation.

Mike