samba - Dec 2003 - Wrestling with Samba, Solaris 9, and groups, and a big thanks

Hi list,

just in case some of you would not know (this mail is sent for reference 
in the list archive) : Solaris, whichever version, is limited to 16 
groups membership for a given user. Including the main user's group.

I learned it the hard way, losing two days with this, thinking it was a 
Samba bug (and it was not).
I was also abused by the fact that Linux has a 32 group limit, limit 
that is on the way to go (see LWN.net - http://lwn.net/Articles/50988/).

But Solaris is stuck to the 16 group membership limit by design. Really?

Naaaa, there is a way to use 32 groups per user. But then, Solaris'NFS 
client wouldn't work anymore, as the following FAQ entry notes 
(http://sunsolve.sun.com/pub-cgi/retrieve.pl?doc=ffaqs/01247) :

" Note: Do not raise the value of NGROUPS_MAX above 16 for systems that 
need to be NFS clients as this will break NFS authorization and those 
users will not be able to login because NFS internally depends on 
NGROUPS_MAX and is limited to only 16. "

So, so far, from Samba-3.0.0-pre3 (including rc1), on both Solaris 9 
(except for Solaris limits ;) and Linux (RH9, full UTF-8), Samba really 
rocks as a PDC/BDC (on Linux, with OpenLDAP), printer server (still on 
Linux, with drivers downloaded to clients), and member share server (the 
running Solaris 9).

So many thanks to all of you, for Samba and for the fastest support on 
the list.

Best regards from a freezing Paris,

J?r?me

-- 
J?r?me Fenal - Consultant Unix/SAN/Logiciel Libre
Groupe Expert & Managed Services - LogicaCMG France
http://www.logicacmg.com/fr/ - <mailto:jerome.fenal AT logicacmg.com>