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At a previous job, I had to use newgrp quite frequently. There's a limit on the number of "active" groups you can be in at a time, typically 16. Groups were use
by hermitdev 6y ago
At a previous job, I had to use newgrp quite frequently. There's a limit on the number of "active" groups you can be in at a time, typically 16. Groups were used for permissions for directories on network storage and our version control system at the time. As far as I'm aware, I was the only person at the company affected because I touched so many different repositories, I was a member of around 20 groups. I had to bounce between them using newgrp (albeit without passwords as in TFA).
I forget the exact reason for the limit of 16, but I think it was an NFS limit.
- throw0101a 6y ago> There's a limit on the number of "active" groups you can be in at a time, typically 16. Groups were used for permissions for directories on network storage and our version control system at the time. This is a limitation of NFS, or more specifically AUTH_SYS per RFC 5531 (§A): * https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5531#page-25 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5531#page-25 A lot (most?) NFS appliances tend to have a setting where you can tell them to ignore the group list that comes in on the RPC call and just do a look-up on the UID themselves: this way they get the full list via LDAP/NIS/AD/whatever and then do permission checks from that.
- dredmorbius 6y agoThe limit exists on some Unixen as well natively (e.g., Solaris), but yes, it's likely most often experienced as an NFS behaviour.
- emmelaich 6y agoMy hack to get around this was to have the user an groupadmin but not necessarily a member of the group. Then that user could add and remove themselves from a group as required, keeping under the 16 limit.