Subject: /etc/group line length followup

From: "Roger A. Hanke" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 11 Jan 1997 15:21:19 -0500

Well, 
 Just testing on my own to determine how many userids I could fit into a 
single guest class line in /etc/group turned up results even worse than 
I expected.
 By the time I got to about 2K characters, only about 225 8 character ids
worth, vi visual mode started crashing on me. Everyone else was still 
processing the file fine but it was clear as it continued to grow that other
problems would arise, probably sooner than later.
 So fell back to plan B. In order to support the maximum possible number
of FTP customers for each of our servers (several thousand), am now
planning to assign a different guest group id for each customers FTP id.
So /etc/group and ftpaccess file each get several thousand lines added
to them potentially, one line defining a group associated with each FTP id.
 Again we need to do this since each FTP customer gets their own unique
chrooted area where they can store their stuff, protected from all other
customers stuff.
 So curious if a several thousand line ftpaccess file sounds like a serious 
problem to anyone? Or if there might be an even better way to support
this many different chrooted customer areas?
 
	Thanx,
	Roger Hanke
	[email-masked]