Users and Groups

[Karl Larsen]

Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> On Fri, 7 Dec 2007, Karl Larsen wrote:
>
>   
>>    I just re-started Users and Groups and clicked on Edit and preferences and
>> put an x in each of the spaces provided. Then I clicked on Help on the top and
>> then Help Contents and neither came up.
>>
>>    The main panel shows nothing but my user data. This is what I saw when I
>> first tried to make me a Group member of uucp. I could find nothing that has a
>> thing to do with uucp! When I click on my line it is just about my login. I
>> gave up.
>>
>>    I used #usermod karl -a -G uucp and that worked. It made karl a member of
>> group uucp.
>>
>>    Went back to Users and Groups trying to verify that usermod did the trick.
>> This time I clicked Edit again and saw preferences and clicked on that. I saw
>> all the things with an x in them and thought this must be right. But just to
>> be sure I removed all the x's.
>>
>>    To my amazement all the Users and Groups were displayed. I found uucp and
>> with the Group tab saw karl,uucp were group members. So it worked. I pretended
>> not to have my karl in the uucp group and clicked on the uucp group and up
>> came a Group properties window. It would be simple to find karl on that list
>> and put an x in that line.
>>
>>    So my two problems with this tool is the lack of help and the way it is
>> found the first time you use it.
>>
>>    There needs to be a way to tell the people working on this application what
>> is wrong. It is not a bug but it needs to get to them.
>>     
>
> but there's a *reason* it's done this way, karl.  typically, when you
> start adding new users, you're not going to add them to the system
> groups. 
    I was not adding a new user or group.
>  what you'd normally do is first create some new groups like,
> say, "sales", "marketing", "helpdesk" and so on.  try it -- create a
> new group called "sales".  you'll notice that it shows up in the list
> when you ask to see the list of current groups.
>   
    I have no need for a new user.
> now when you create new users, you can choose to add them to your new
> (non-system) groups.  that's the way it's *supposed* to work.  you're
> not supposed to commonly add users to the *system* groups -- that's
> why those groups are, by default, not displayed.  if, by chance, you
> really *need* to do that, it's still available.  but that's not
> displayed by default because it's not encouraged behaviour, that's
> all.
Why did someone invent "usermod"? And when you do a ls -l on /dev/ttyS0, 
the first serial port you notice:

[root at k5di ~]# ls -al /dev/ttyS0
crw-rw---- 1 root uucp 4, 64 2007-12-07 04:52 /dev/ttyS0
[root at k5di ~]#

The only way I can ever use Com1 is to be root or belong to the uucp Group.

>   you generally need a really good reason to add a user to a
> system group.
>   
    I and many others will find really good reasons.

Karl

> rday
>
> ========================================================================
> Robert P. J. Day
> Linux Consulting, Training and Annoying Kernel Pedantry
> Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA
>
> http://crashcourse.ca
> ========================================================================
>
>   


-- 

	Karl F. Larsen, AKA K5DI
	Linux User
	#450462   http://counter.li.org.