Description of problem: I have a system that is to be used as a samba server but forget samba and consider core os users. I have a user called administrator and when this is used there are all kinds of problems such as problems with groups where administrator is a member and other problems. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Create quite a few groups - 100 ish and add the user administrator to those groups. You will find that administrator can only get into so many of the groups - a certain depth down the list but no further. I am assuming that the word administrator is a key word and should not be used for users or group names. I wondered if it affects a certain number of groups - maybe that the top 40 are considered system groups and it is ok in those and after that it is not used. A strange problem I know but it is there Steps to Reproduce: 1. Create 100 ish groups - in our case 100 users with a group the same as the username and make the owner the user and the group the owners group. 2. Add the user administrator to each users group and try to gain access to each home directory 3. It should work until you are so far down the group list and then it should give access denied. Actual results: Access denied after so many groups Expected results: Access to all groups. Additional info: Seems to have been a long time problem with older versions of redhat 8, 9 and fedora. Not sure if it is a bash problem - not sure what users and groups fall under.
I have found that it is not that administrator is a keyword. It seems that a user can only be added to 32 secondary groups. This in my case administrator was added to each users group and when i hit the 32nd user in the list then administrator could not access any users after that. Thus please can you explain if this is a bug or an intended feature of the kernel
in 2.4 kernels, there is a hard limit of 32 of the number of groups that a user may belong to. For 2.6 kernels, this limit has been raised iirc to 65535