Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!rice!sun-spots-request
From: eastick@me.utoronto.ca (Doug Eastick)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun
Subject: Re: Limitation on number of /etc/group memberships?
Message-ID: <2032@brazos.Rice.edu>
Date: 6 Oct 89 03:53:54 GMT
Sender: root@rice.edu
Organization: Sun-Spots
Lines: 23
Keywords: SunOS
Approved: Sun-Spots@rice.edu
X-Sun-Spots-Digest: Volume 8, Issue 157, message 5 of 14

dupuy@cs.columbia.edu writes:

>> RPC error: Invalid authentication
>> /home/user-id: not owner

>This is a bug in Sun NFS support in 4.0.  Under SunOS 3.x and 4.2 BSD, the
>group limit was 8.  SunOS 4.0 and 4.3 BSD raise the group limit to 16, but
>the NFS protocol had only 8 slots for group membership information when
>using Unix authentication.

SunOS4.0.3c wants each user to be in 8 groups or less, for the above case;
and each line in /etc/group must have less than about 30 members (~2.5
screen lines in our case) or else portmapper won't startup at boottime. I
don't know why, but we fixed it by using multi-line group entries. Eg:

	staff:joe,john,frank,harry
	staff:mary,betty,guido

With one big-long-line, portmapper won't start and any NFS mounts will
give you RPC: program not registered errors.

Doug Eastick	eastick@me.UTORONTO.BITNET	UUCP: ...!utai!me!eastick
		eastick@me.utoronto.ca