I was domain joining some Redhat Enterprise Linux 7 boxes to a Windows domain. Everything went smoothly except many of my users could only see their Primary groups. Some users whom had more permissions on the domain could see all their groups, just not some particular users. This seems to be a common failure scenario for SSSD with AD, and many people have opened bugs or chimed in with different fixes online. I found the solution on one forum post, and it saved me, and I wanted to amplify it.

As long as some of your users can see all their groups, you know its not exactly a problem with RHEL connecting to AD, or a protocol like LDAP being blocked. A odd side effect of this setup was periodically the groups could be scanned and then it would show the users in that group. If I ran “sss_cache -E“, then “getent group SecondaryGroup“, some of the time it would show the users inside the group. Then once the user logged in, the user would be removed via that command, as well as when I ran “groups” under the user.

The SSSD log didnt have a ton of help other than it couldn’t read all the groups. I tried a TON of the recommended settings, like enabling enumerate = True, enumerate = false, ldap_use_tokengroups = true, ldap_use_tokengroups = false; none of these changed anything. Then https://serverfault.com/a/938893 mentioned it may be a permissions problem between the computer object in AD and the user object. I looked and sure enough, my system had NO permissions on the users that were failing. I attempted to add the tokenGroups permission mentioned in this article and that still didnt help, but we were on the right track!

The answer came from https://serverfault.com/a/796005, there is a permission needed called “Read Remote Access Information”, once that is granted to your computer object onto the user, then secondary groups will start populating. I gave “Domain Computers” that permission, since it seemed to only be effecting some of the Linux systems and Windows was happy to have it as well.

Some random commands that can help you debugging SSSD:

SSSD likes to cache a lot, making it hard to troubleshoot, using the following clears all caches and restarts SSSD:

systemctl stop sssd && rm -rf /var/lib/sss/db/* && rm -rf /var/lib/sss/mc/* && systemctl start sssd