Another workstation question: Anaconda user creation

[Chris Murphy]

On Aug 18, 2014, at 1:50 PM, Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro at gnome.org> wrote:

> On Mon, 2014-08-18 at 22:20 +0300, Elad Alfassa wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> quick question I'd like to see some discussion about: Anaconda allows
>> setting a password to the root user, or to create a normal user during
>> the installation.
>> 
>> 
>> I think that we should hide the option to create a normal user (for
>> the workstation image only), since we already do this in
>> gnome-initial-setup where it makes more sense.
>> 
>> 
>> What do you think?
> 
> Yes, initial user creation should belong to gnome-initial-setup. (For
> the Workstation image only.)
> 
> I'm not even certain that we want to allow setting a root password in
> the installer. (For the Workstation image only.) Having an extra
> password to remember is half as user-friendly, gnome-initial-setup will
> put the first user into wheel anyway, and gnome-control-center will
> never allow deletion of the last user in wheel. It's been optional for a
> couple releases now (you can just skip that spoke in anaconda and your
> system will work fine :), and Ubuntu has been doing it this way since
> about 2008 or so with no problems.

To confirm the proposed behavior for Workstation:

- root user exists but is given some unknown passphrase, e.g. from /dev/random
- installer doesn't prompt for either root or user creation/password setting
- gnome-initial-setup causes first user to be created, group wheel, therefore sudo works
- user has the option to "sudo passwd root"

To me this seems appropriate as long as kickstart installs can still somehow specify a passphrase for root (or probably more safely, to specify the hash to store); or other best practice to setup a Workstation for remote admin, maybe user "radmin".


Chris Murphy