Dell FluidFS NAS Solutions Administrator's Guide

Description

User cannot access the NFS file or directory even though the user belongs to the group owning the NFS object and the group members are permitted to perform the operation.

Cause

NFS servers (versions 2 and 3) use the Remote Procedure Call (RPC) protocol for authentication of NFS clients. Most RPC clients have a limitation of up to 16 groups passed to the NFS server. If a user belongs to more than 16 UNIX groups, as supported by some UNIX flavors, some of the groups are not passed and are not checked by the NFS server and thus the user's access may be denied.

Workaround

A possible way to verify this problem is to use newgrp to temporarily change the primary group of the user and thus ensure it is passed to the server.

The simple workaround, although not always feasible, is to remove the user from unnecessary groups, leaving only 16 groups or less.