On Mar 1, 2012, at 10:53 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:
On Thu, 2012-03-01 at 17:43 -0500, Adam Jackson wrote:
> On Thu, 2012-03-01 at 16:39 -0500, Daniel J Walsh wrote:
>
>> I believe Fedora 17 has an add user to admin group checkbox when
>> adding the initial user, not sure if it is checked on or off by default.
>
> Off by default (having just tried it today).
In case anyone's wondering what that actually does, here's what I can
figure out.
What it does directly is to add the user to the 'wheel' group. I'm not
sure what all the consequences of that are, but there's two I've been
able to find. The first is that the default /etc/sudoers allows people
in the wheel group to run any command as root, which is great and all,
but we don't use sudo for anything at the desktop level, so it really
only affects people who run sudo from the console.
The other thing it does, if I'm reading stuff right, is that users in
the wheel group are considered 'admins' by PolicyKit. That's good. Now
as to what that means, I'm not 100% sure, but I *think* what it means is
that for any action which would require a non-admin user to authenticate
as root, an admin user can authenticate as themselves. i.e. instead of a
root password dialog, you'd get a your-own-password dialog. I might be
off base there, though, and if I am I'm sure someone smarter will
correct me. :)
From my own experience, anything I change in the GUI that requires authentication, it is
for user 'chris' if that user was added as an admin with the checkbox in the
create first user steps. If that checkbox is not checked, any authentication dialog that
appears is for user 'root'.
My interpretation of Torvalds' complaint, is with the mere existence of authentication
dialogs in the first place, for certain things. Mac OS X has always required
authentication (from a user with "admin" privileges) for changing the Date/Time
including time zones, which is an absurdity. In the most recent version, it's no
longer possible for a non-authenticated user with admin privileges (in effect two levels
of privileges for the same user with the same login and the same password) to install e.g.
ICC color profiles to a folder making the profiles available to all users. So I'm an
admin, and if I want to modify a folder, I have to enter my password in a pop-up
authentication dialog to add/remove ICC profiles. Worse, the individual user folder for
these profiles is now hidden by default. It's high order insanity.
Chris Murphy