Group permission problem

[Ben Li]

I use SAM to create a new user Id AAA with its primary group as Staff, and add it to another group mqm.
But when I login as AAA and try to open a file which has the group permission of mqm, the system reject me said 'permission denied'. It seems I don't have the right to access the file. I can access the files that has Staff group permission.
When I use following command it shows:
$groups
Staff
$groups AAA
mqm Staff

Does anyone can tell me what cause this to happen?

For Solaris if I login as AAA, the command shows:
$groups
Staff mqm
$groups AAA
Staff mqm

Thanks

[Brian M. Fisher · Accepted solution]

Create a symbolic link between /etc/logingroup and /etc/group

This will assure you are in BOTH groups when you log in.

Brian
<*(((>< er

[Rick Garland]

The default group is staff. Use the newgrp command to achieve what you want.

[Phil Corchary]

This works OK for me in HPUX 11.0.

Check your /etc/group file and verify the group membership for the user.

[Tim Malnati]

Here is my attempt to explain what is going on:

When a user logs into a system, /etc/passwd, /etc/group, and /etc/logingroup are referenced. /etc/passwd indicates the primary group for the user. /etc/group indicates the additional groups that a user has permission to access at some point in his login session. /etc/logingroup indicates ALL the groups that the user has access permissions to immediately after he logs into the machine. Without /etc/logingroup, the user will be required to use the newgrp command in order to access files that are not part of his primary group. A link form /etc/logingroup to /etc/group simply makes everything accessable at login. But there may be a situation where you may desire a user to have access to multiple groups at login but not necessarily all of the groups that he has rights to. In this case /etc/logingroup would be a separate file and would only contain the groups that he would have access to at login time.