[2666] in testers
Re: Too many groups in 7.7E
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Dorothy Bowe)
Wed Aug 3 09:21:11 1994
To: "Naomi B. Schmidt" <nschmidt@MIT.EDU>
Cc: testers@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: [2665]
Date: Wed, 03 Aug 1994 09:20:40 EDT
From: Dorothy Bowe <dot@MIT.EDU>
Yes, it is a known feature and I can't explain it any better than Kevin
did in the latest version of User Release Notes:
Group Memberships Curtailed. Although in principle you can become a
member of any number of Hesiod "groups" (member-based file-access
permission lists), particular platforms can only recognize a set number
of groups at a time. This limiting number differs from platform to
platform. In order to support cross-platform compatability, the number
of groups recognized by the different platforms has been purposefully
reduced in some cases. For example, Athena DECstations used to recognize
29 groups -- they now recognize only 13 groups. Thus, if you [remotely]
log into a DECstation and you belong to a large number of groups, you
may receive a message of the form:
Too many groups.
This means that you belong to more groups than the platform supports. In
this case, groups beyond the number that the platform supports will be
ignored. (They still exist in the Hesiod database, but the local system
does not recognize the extra groups for the course of your session.) If
you are in "too many groups" and you need to have the system recognize
some group membership of yours, you will need to reduce the number of
groups you are a member of (e.g., using blanche) until the group you
want is included within the first part of your groups list. You can see
your group memberships by entering the following command at your athena%
prompt:
hesinfo $user grplist
Group limits affects only particular UNIX file systems, such as NFS -- a
typical Athena session involving AFS directories (no matter what Athena
platform) would not typically run into this problem.
I hope this helps.
./dot
