Problems Accessing the Samba PASS Gateway for users with more than thirty-two groups

A limitation has been identified with the service that provides the Samba PASS Gateway (win.pass.psu.edu, smb.pass.psu.edu, cifs.pass.psu.edu, samba.pass.psu.edu), in which users who are members of more than thirty-two groups may have problems accessing content. When a user is a member of thirty-two groups, only the thirty-two groups with the lowest GID numbers apply in file permissions. GID numbers are simply numerical identifiers (on the backend) that are connected to the actual names of groups. If a user has membership in less than thirty-two groups, this problem does not occur. This problem has existed since the scheduled 2008 PASS Migration, which was completed on July 4. In addition, the issue exists on the server -side, so all client platforms (Windows, Macintosh, etc.) are affected. As a workaround, a user may be added to a file or folder's permissions directly when the group permission fails to apply.

It should be noted that this issue does not affect access to PASS via other services such as the NFS PASS Gateway, Secure FTP to PASS or PASS Explorer.

A design change request has been opened with the vendor to address this issue.