16 group limitation against a user in AIX 5.3?

[jpor2003]

Hi Gurus,

I am currently working on a problem where we have users belonging to more than 16 groups against their user IDs. Is there a way in AIX 5.3 TL08 SP4 to increase the number of groups passed 16? If so, how do you do this?

Thanks In advance.

Jon.

 

[p5wizard]

I am not aware of any such limit...

HTH,

p5wizard

 

[ogniemi]

maybe this is RPC/NFS related issue on youe site (probably RPC protocol limits this to 16)?

I've read somewhere that NFS v4 honours more than 16 group ids. the 16 is the limit for NFSv3...

 

[jpor2003]

Thanks for the responses thus far. We are not using NFS v3 or NIS, the inclenation at the moment is that AIX as well as other flavours of UNIX have group limits to users (HP_UX has 20 for example). The reason we are looking into this is because we were told to use ACL to get around this problem, but as we are a long way off from using this mehtod the inclination is to stay with the standard user and groups on our systems. I do believe you can still assign more than 16 groups to a user account, but from group number 17 onwards the user has no permissions to read/write/eXecute. Doing a google search has produced no answers thus far. the Pseries IBM support pages only mentions the /etc/security/limits.h file, but I beleive this is not for this problem?

 

[mrn]

The maximum number of groups an user can belong to (both in AIX 5.3 and 6.1) is 128.

Check the /usr/include/sys/limits.h for information:


#define NGROUPS_MAX 128 /* max number of supplementary group IDs
per process, >= 0 */

The maximum number of groups that can be created on the system is 2000.

/usr/include/grp.h:

#define MAXGRP 2000

As stated before sound like problems with NFS

If the owner group of a file/directry was not within the first 17 groups of a user.
the users would not be able to write into that directory.

I believe that should be fixed in NFSv4.

Mike

"Whenever I dwell for any length of time on my own shortcomings, they gradually begin to seem mild, harmless, rather engaging little things, not at all like the staring defects in other people's characters."

 

[jpor2003]

Thanks mrn. I take it AIX5.2 < had this issue then? Or is this the same?