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Date:      Fri, 13 Feb 2009 14:52:12 +1000
From:      Da Rock <rock_on_the_web@comcen.com.au>
To:        Chuck Swiger <cswiger@mac.com>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Old user can't log in
Message-ID:  <1234500741.13067.111.camel@laptop1.herveybayaustralia.com.au>
In-Reply-To: <470E75B0-C7E9-4F05-A112-62DF01F1EA1D@mac.com>
References:  <325E4EC8-BD2B-45C1-978C-4922D16D3A94@identry.com> <9391FD2D-59ED-455A-8C87-2854C7EF1E52@mac.com> <ECDF6933-47F6-4D67-AC5C-5E149590D971@identry.com> <1234498626.13067.96.camel@laptop1.herveybayaustralia.com.au> <470E75B0-C7E9-4F05-A112-62DF01F1EA1D@mac.com>

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On Thu, 2009-02-12 at 20:37 -0800, Chuck Swiger wrote:
> On Feb 12, 2009, at 8:17 PM, Da Rock wrote:
> > I've been following this thread with interest: are you saying FreeBSD
> > logins cannot handle more than 16 groups? If so, why? Is this  
> > mitigated
> > by using other authentication methods (ie kerberos, ldap, etc)?
> 
> There's a compile-time limit of the relevant kernel data structures as  
> to how many groups a user can be in, described by "sysctl  
> kern.ngroups".  It's possible to recompile the kernel with a larger  
> number, but doing so will break NFS (and possibly other things).  It  
> doesn't matter whether you use Kerberos, LDAP, etc to set up the  
> groups; while those things do not have a 16-group limit, the FreeBSD  
> kernel [1] does.
> 
> With reasonable organization, and appropriate use of sudo or setgid  
> binaries for things like people who use SVN or CVS, there generally  
> isn't reason or need for a user to be in so many groups.  For the  
> exceptional cases, switching to using a full ACL system rather than  
> the traditional Unix permission model is probably going to be a better  
> solution.

Interesting. What would you suggest for full ACL?




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