[PLUG] Max groups per user??

["Michael F. Robbins" <mike@gamerack.com>]

I have a webserver, running (originally redhat 6.2 based), kernel 2.4.2,
glibc 2.1.3-22, apache 1.3.20.

I host a bunch of websites for myself and friends.  Every user stores
their HTML files in /home/[USERNAME]/public_html.  The directory
"/home/[USERNAME]" itself is owned by the user and group [USERNAME], and
has permissions 750.  The directory "/home/[USERNAME]/public_html" is
owned by the user and group [USERNAME], and has permissions 755.  Apache
runs as user/group www, and is configured with individual VirtualHost
blocks for each one.  This setup works because for each group
[USERNAME], the user "www" is a member of that group.

For example, the user "mikeweb":
 drwxr-x---    5 mikeweb  mikeweb      4096 May 11 18:40 /home/mikeweb
 drwxr-xr-x    7 mikeweb  mikeweb      4096 Jul  3 21:55 public_html
 [mikeweb@hydrogen mikeweb]$ cat /etc/group | grep mikeweb
 mikeweb:x:551:www

Anyway, problems have started to show up today because I just added
another user, "flash".  Apache reports "Forbidden" unless I do a "chmod
755 /home/flash".  When I run a "groups www" as root, it does show
"flash" as one of the groups that user www is a member of.  However, if
I run "groups" as www, it cuts off "flash".  I counted, and flash would
be the 33rd in the list (so its only displaying the first 32).

After some searching on Google, I learned that in fact, a user can only
be a member of 32 groups.  My real question is how to proceed from
here.  Here are my current ideas:

1) Rebuild kernel/glibc/whatever else to allow more than 32 groups per
user.  That doesn't sound like fun.
2) Download and play with Linux ACLs to get something acceptable
working.  That doesn't sound like much fun either...
3) Change my policy and just make the home directories chmoded 755.  (I
don't like this because then its trivial for someone to look in someone
else's home directory.  It's the reason why I used my group membership
scheme in the first place.)

Any other ideas?  Or a suggestion on which way to go?

Mike


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