Make an existing user part of Administrators

[Bill Oliver]

Heh.  I just remember back when I was a grad student using UNIX, "wheel" *was* root, was in the /etc/passwd file, and there was no such thing as root.  I swear I distinctly remember running an IRIX network back in the 90s when root was no longer "wheel" but suddenly became "root," and "wheel" was all passe.  In all these years, I never had occasion to notice that while "wheel" disappeared from /etc/passwd, it stayed in /etc/group.  Now that I think about it, I guess I never set up a user account with root privileges.  There was just root and users who could sudo.

But then, a lot of things have changed.  When I started grad school, I remember the Chair advising the first year students on how to learn good programming.  He told us "Find a PhD student you really admire and poke around in his home account to find stuff he is coding.  Copy it to your home directory and study it.  It's OK, anything anybody doesn't want looked at should be copied to the "personal" directory."  And, sure enough, *all* of the student, staff, and faculty home directories were globally readable.  You could change your permissions on your home acct, but it was considered antisocial.  If I looked hard enough, I could probably find old code by a bunch of nowadays-senior NVIDIA folk in my backups from when we were in grad school together -- if I could find a 9-track tape reader somewhere.

I guess the wheel group was of those old-timey things I assumed had changed, but never did.


billo

On Tue, 13 Nov 2012, Matthew Miller wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 13, 2012 at 04:10:02PM +0000, Bill Oliver wrote:
>> From the documentation,
>> (http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/17/html/Installation_Guide/sn-firstboot-systemuser.html
>> )
>> it seems that checking on "administrator" just puts the user in the
>> wheel group.
>
> It just does that, *but*, many things in the distribution, including sudo,
> consolehelper, and policykit, are configured to understand that this means
> that the user is an admin.
>
>> Odd -- I thought "wheel" had been deprecated years ago, and was kept in
>> only for backwards compatibility.  Who knew.
>
> Many people? :)
>
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> Matthew Miller  ☁☁☁  Fedora Cloud Architect  ☁☁☁  <mattdm at fedoraproject.org>
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