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Date:      Tue, 20 Mar 2001 11:30:52 +0100
From:      Wolfram Schneider <bsd@panke.de.freebsd.org>
To:        Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org>
Cc:        Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com>, Sergey Babkin <babkin@bellatlantic.net>, security@FreeBSD.ORG, Wes Peters <wes@softweyr.com>, Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.ORG>, fs@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: about common group & user ID space (PR kern/14584)
Message-ID:  <20010320113052.A1141@paula.panke.de.freebsd.org>
In-Reply-To: <4.3.2.7.2.20010318123759.00d9dd10@localhost>; from brett@lariat.org on Sun, Mar 18, 2001 at 12:42:17PM -0700
References:  <3AB3FC38.94711FFF@bellatlantic.net> <200103180738.AAA03250@usr05.primenet.com> <4.3.2.7.2.20010318123759.00d9dd10@localhost>

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On 2001-03-18 12:42:17 -0700, Brett Glass wrote:
> At the same time, it'd be nice to eliminate the arbitrary limitations
> on (a) the number of groups of which a user can be a member and (b) the
> number of members in a group. Both of these limitations often bite
> administrators who, for example, want most users of a system to be 
> members of a particular group or want to implement group-based access 
> control schemes with a moderate degree of granularity. 

The current length limit for a line in /etc/groups is 256KByte, 
which should be enough for 65536 users in one group ;-)

Please keep in mind that other OS has lower limits, eg. 
Solaris had a limit of 1024 characters (~200 user per group)
and NIS/YP may not work with lines longer 1024 characters.

You can increase the limit if you want and recompile your libc.
See src/lib/libc/gen/getgrent.c,v for more details. The support
for long lines was added in Dec 1996.

-Wolfram

-- 
Wolfram Schneider <wosch@freebsd.org> http://wolfram.schneider.org

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