authunix_create_default: tooo many

[Steve DeJarnett]

In article <10000002 at net4> bothe at net4.UUCP writes:
>After boot, I cannot mount or unmount nfs-filesystems.
>ERRORMSG: URPC: authunix_create_default: too many groups
>
>Invoked at boot time (fstab) all does go rigth!
>
>The same message occures at "rup"
>
>My System: a TARGON/35 (PYRAMID) with
>TOS 3.3 (ATT V.2.2 + Berk 4.3)
>Earlier releases (TOS 3.1, 3.2) showed the same error
>
>can anyone tell me, where the error comes from ?

	This is a "problem" with NFS (actually, I think the problem is 
actually due to a limitation in a table size in the RPC stuff somewhere, but
I'm not positive).  Basically, there's a table that holds a list of all of
the groups you belong to.  Some far-sighted individual at Sun (I suspect) 
decided long ago that no one in their right minds would be in more than 8
groups, so they set the maximum number of groups to 8 (I suspect that there's
an array lurking in the code that is predefined to have only 8 entries).  
What appears to be happening is that your account 'root' (or some other uid-0
account you're trying to do this from) belongs to more than 8 groups, and 
when trying to do NFS-related work, it dies because of an RPC error due to 
the fact that you belong to > 8 groups.

	I suspect the easiest solution would be to take root out of most of
the groups it belongs to (since root really doesn't need to belong to dozens
of groups to obtain access to files).  This should put you back under the 8
group limit, and everything should work correctly.

	I'm told that more recent versions of NFS/RPC have this limitation
removed from them, but I don't know this for certain, as I only belong to 7
groups on our Suns :-).

	Hope that helps some (I also hope I didn't make any major screwups in
the description).

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Steve DeJarnett            | Smart Mailers -> steve at polyslo.CalPoly.EDU     |
| Computer Systems Lab       | Dumb Mailers  -> ..!ucbvax!voder!polyslo!steve |
| Cal Poly State Univ.       |------------------------------------------------|
| San Luis Obispo, CA  93407 | BITNET = Because Idiots Type NETwork           |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------