Fixing the Solaris groups limit (CR 4088757 *Escalated* Updated P5 kernel/other Customer would like to increase ngroups_max more than 32)

[David Collier-Brown]

  In my copious spare time (:-)), I've been working on a decent solution
to the 32-group limit in Solaris, which we've discussed here before,
with respect to Vanderbilt University. This is a new shared library 
which intercepts getgroups, setgroups and open.

  My colleagues who actually work on Samba at Sun (I work on remote
system/storage monitoring) are treating this as a bug, and will
discuss my proposed fix and others with Solaris sustaining engineering.

  The folks who really work on this are 
Martha Starkey -- tech support engineer,
Lou Asmar - escalations engineer

  I'll let Martha introduce herself:
> My name is Martha Starkey and I'm a Technical Support Engineer at Sun
> Microsystems in Burlington, MA. I have been with Sun since 1998. I
> currently support the network products.  I have been supporting the
> network products for 7 months now; prior to that, I supported all the
> Sun printing and lp products; the serial console and all serial ports;
> ppp and uucp, tip, cu, ttymon and related commands.
> 
> I got the case from Vanderbilt University on February 28.  The customer
> contact was Eric Hall.  There wasn't much troubleshooting to do as the
> problem was clear: the ngroups_max variable is fixed and in order for
> Vanderbilt to integrate Sun's Samba into their Windows ADS environment,
> that variable must be unlimited.
> 
> I described this issue on an internal Sun mail list and that's how I
> hooked up with David.  I also escalated this issue internally as it was
> clear that it couldn't be solved at my level.

I'll open a separate bug for this, and link to 1184, 1191, 1212...
done, it's number 2496.

--dave
-- 
David Collier-Brown,      | Always do right. This will gratify
Sun Microsystems, Toronto | some people and astonish the rest
davecb at canada.sun.com     |                      -- Mark Twain