Knowledge Base

At larger sites, they can have a very large number of groups, for example, at one of the PaperCut sites they have over 250,000 groups! When there are so many groups, the PaperCut window for choosing which groups to add to PaperCut can take a very long time to retrieve the information from the Active Directory and can actually time out. This can make selecting groups to add to PaperCut using the application web interface slow or unusable.

To workaround this problem, there is a configuration setting that can be made where one can manually list the set of groups. Once this configuration is set, PaperCut will no longer query Active Directory, LDAP, etc to retrieve the list of groups but will rather use the list specified in the configuration settings to populate the Available Groups window.

To enable this work-around do the following:

1. Login to the system as an administrator (e.g. the built-in admin account).
2. Navigate to the Options section.
3. Click on the "Config editor (advanced)" link in the Actions list on the left.
4. In the quick find, enter part of the config key, "override", and press GO.
5. Locate the required key, "user-source.group-list-override" and enter a new value for the list of groups. The list of groups can be comma separated (,) or pipe (|) separated. e.g. "My_Group1, My_Group2, My_Group3". You can also include AD Org Units, see below for the how to format Org Unit names.
6. Press the Update button to the right to apply the change.

Now you can test this setting out:

1. Navigate to the Groups section.
2. Click on the "Add/Remove Groups" link in the Actions list on the left.

The available list of Groups should now have your list from above: e.g. My_Group1, My_Group2, My_Group3. You will also notice a warning message at the top of the page that reminds you that this option is currently enforced: "The list of group names is not sourced from the operating system, but from the config key 'user-source.group-list-override'."

Important: If you have groups already entered in the interface, make sure they appear in your list. This key overrides/replaces any of your existing groups settings.

AD Organizational Unit Name Format

When entering a "group" override list, you may also use Active Directory Org Units. PaperCut expects the Org Unit names in a particular format as follows:

  OU:<domain>/org/unit/name

The name must be prefixed with the with OU: which indicates to PaperCut that this is an AD Org Unit and not a normal group. Some examples include:

  OU:yourdomain.com/Users

  OU:anotherdomain.com/Staff

  OU:domain.com/DivisionA/Staff

Categories: Users

Keywords: browser, large AD, large groups, many groups, delays, hundreds, thousands, container, org unit, containers, LDAP

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