kern.ngroups question

[Hartmut Brandt]

Reuben A. Popp wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> Can someone explain to me the rationale behind having ngroups_max set to 16 by 
> default?
>
> I came across this issue originally when working on our Samba implementation 
> (samba-3 out of ports, running on 6-STABLE).  We have some users that belong 
> to a number of groups, some of whom need to belong to more groups than the 
> defined hard limit.  On doing a little research, I did come across the PR 
> detailed in http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=kern/108552, and 
> continued reading the linked thread from March 2003, however this really 
> doesn't explain why the limit is set to 16.  
>
> Can one adjust the value in syslimits.h on a system and then rebuild 
> world/ports with the expectation this will work, or is the issue more 
> involved then that?  Is (or has) there any discussion on raising that number 
> to a larger value?
>   
My desktop runs with ngroups 64 for over two years. The accounts come 
from an AD with a lot of groups for everything. If I remember correctly 
I fixed a number of issues in libc with regarding to truncating the 
group list when packing it into RPCs. It now just ignores the extra 
groups instead of dumping core :-) So if you don't need the group 
memberships for NFS access thing should work.

harti