Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 13279
Cannot `su' with 37 groups
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:37:56 EDT
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.
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.