I have 160 users on our school lan server. All are members of users. yast has also made them members of uucp, dialout, audio and video. NIS complains: makedbm warning: data too long: uucp x 14: (list of users) same for dialout, audio and video. Why does yast make them members of these other groups? To overcome the error, I've removed them from these groups. Now they are only members of users. What are they now missing? Is the 'users' group special in some way that it doesn't have a limit for its data? What can't they do now that they could by being members of the other groups? What is the limit to the string that NIS can handle? Sorry for so many questions, it's just it seems that the nis documentation is the exception to the rtfm, rule :-( SuSE 9.0 with the 21-166 kernel from YOU. Thanks for your patience. steve.