[SLL] overcoming NFS group limits

[Paul Franz]

On Mon, May 11, 2009 2:14 pm, Ted Stern wrote:
> This is more of a general Unix question, but I'm looking for a
> solution on a Linux server.
>
> If a user accesses an NFS-mounted disk, NFS supports only the first 16
> groups of which that user is a member.
>
> This might seem ample for most small systems, but I'm at a large
> company with lots of projects, and due to accounting rules a plethora
> of groups were created over the years.
>
> We've done a major group cleanup (which should have been done anyway)
> but there are still some users who, because of their involvement with many
> projects, have to be members of lots of groups.
>
> So, two questions:

Hey hey - you trying to pull a fast one? Looks like you're trying to tempt the genius
of this group by pleading for the answers for two questions when you've got three! :)

> 1) Is there any hope that NFS will support more than 16 groups in the
> near future?

I'm not the one with answers to that one.

> 2) Are there any alternatives to NFS?

Yes, of course. Likely you know them and don't want to see them bounced back at you
but I'm going to. First, you might want to rethink completely the way in which you use
and deliver files and data. My experience with Samba shows performance to be
acceptable. But maybe user access via web based application under Apache and using PHP
might improve some instances of data usability. As, I said. Nothing new to you though.

> 3) Are there any network mountable filesystems that have support for
> access control lists?  Note that the protocol has to be at least as
> fast as NFS because we're supporting multi-GB file access.

I know it's expensive, but have you looked into SAN?

-- 
Paul Franz
425.440.9505 (O)
425.241.1618 (C)