Bug 13279

Summary:	Cannot `su' with 37 groups
Product:	[Retired] Red Hat Linux	Reporter:	Bob Apodaca <bob>
Component:	glibc	Assignee:	Jakub Jelinek <jakub>
Status:	CLOSED NOTABUG	QA Contact:
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	6.2
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	i386
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2000-06-30 17:13:21 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Bob Apodaca 2000-06-30 17:13:19 UTC

We use NIS here with user `root' in almost every group in our NIS
/etc/group file.  On our workstations, we cannot su to root:

bash>/bin/su -
Password: 
/bin/su: cannot set groups: Invalid argument

I believe the problem is that there is a limit of 32 groups in glibc and
this is preventing me from su'ing to root.

Comment 1 Jakub Jelinek 2000-08-25 15:55:31 UTC

This is actually kernel limitation. You can rebuild kernel (and glibc as well)
yourself to up that limit, in the kernel it is in linux/limits.h and asm/params.h,
in glibc you'll just need to make sure the updated kernel headers are installed
in the system before recompiling glibc. Note however that increasing that
value will eat up space in every tasks' task_struct.
It has no point in increasing this generally when 99.99% people will not need
it and it would just decrease the kernel stack for them.