Dynamic groups (was Samba and groups > 16)

[Jeremy Allison]

On Mon, Mar 07, 2005 at 11:33:13AM -0500, David Collier-Brown wrote:
> David Collier-Brown wrote:
> >And yes, this is exactly the case, the list is getting truncated
> >on Solaris 9.
> 
>  Am I correct in thinking the Samba team was one of the
> proponents of larger number of groups in Linux, as
> implied by http://lwn.net/Articles/50916 ?

Yep.

>  Does that perhaps mean that folks with older
> Unixes (Solarii, BSDs, HP/UX, AIX, etc, etc)
> are still banging up against this on \large sites 
> with AD and large numbers of NT groups?

Yep.

>  If so, should the limited set of groups 
> that Unix allows perhaps be used as a cache of the
> recently-used groups?  For example, if a
> user attempts to open a file belonging to
> group 17, and they only have 0-16 in their group
> list, should samba toss out the least
> recently used group, stick 17 in its
> place and retry the open?

Hmmm. That's doable, but quite an intrusive patch. I'm willing
to consider it, but probably not write it :-). In the meantime,
I'm just going to suggest people switch to Linux if they need
large numbers of groups.

Jeremy.