samba - Oct 2003 - Group members list being truncated in netgroup expansion

Hi,

I'm using @<netgroup> syntax in my smb.conf  (e.g. in valid users =
...)
to refer to groups of users which are defined in /etc/group. The problem
is that the group file has multiple lines for the same groupname/GID
because there are so many members. Samba only interprets the first
instance of the groupname and not the 2nd and 3rd etc.

I cannot concatenate the groups lines as this breaks other applications
which cannot take such long group file lines.
I even tried to workaround the problem by writing a perl script to
expand and replace the groups with lists of member user names but this
ended up exceeding the 1024 character limit in smb.conf. 

I am using Redhat 7.2 with GLIBC 2.2.4 on Linux version 2.4.21, Samba
version 2.2.8a
Upgrading GLIBC is not an option due to build standards
This all worked fine in Samba 2.2.3.

Any suggestions would be useful for working around or fixing this issue.

Thanks

Phil Lewis
Unix Sysadmin