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Date: Mon, 24 Jul 2006 10:08:46 -0500
From: Dan Nelson <dnelson@allantgroup.com>
To: Roberto Nunnari <roberto.nunnari@supsi.ch>
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Cc: "'freebsd-questions@freebsd.org'" <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>
Subject: Re: max number of groups a user can be member of
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In the last episode (Jul 24), Roberto Nunnari said:
> Hi everybody.
> 
> Could anybody tell me the reason why by default FreeBSD
> limits the number of groups a user can be member of to 16?

Compatibility with the NFS protocol.  A google search on "nfs 16
groups" returned a lot of hits.

http://www.sunmanagers.org/archives/1998/1328.html
http://nfsworld.blogspot.com/2005/03/whats-deal-on-16-group-id-limitation.html

You can raise the limit, but you need to make sure that you raise it on
all servers that share NFS mounts.  If you don't you may end up with
remote file access either failing or not passing the full group
membership list to the remote server, which could cause incorrect
"permission denied" errors.

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson@allantgroup.com