Linux Groups

[Balasubramanian, Raja]

Hi All,

How many secondary groups can a user belong to in Linux. I read something about 15 secondary groups,could somebody confirm ?

I see some users are part of more than 30 secondary groups.

Thanks,
Raja

[Matti_Kurkela]

To see the kernel's limit, run "getconf NGROUPS_MAX". On my Linux, it says "65536" so the kernel has no problems with a large number of groups.

If you use NFS, the NFS protocol version 3 or earlier can handle a maximum of 16 groups (=1 primary + 15 secondary groups) per user.

This is a NFS protocol limitation that impacts all OSs that use NFSv3 or earlier, not only Linux.

MK

[Balasubramanian, Raja]

Hi Kurkela,

Thanks for the response,I currently have a RHEL AS Release 3 server which has a limit of 32 groups.Is there a way to increase the same.

Regards,
Raja.B