Arch Linux

BigZ

Member

Registered: 2010-06-07

Posts: 6

[Gnome 3] Misleading Administrator setting

Hi,

today I explored the settings menu of GNOME 3 and was surprised, that my standard user was of the type "administrator" as I thought it referred to root. I scratched my head and changed it to "standard".

I discovered shortly after, that I could no longer run the su command successfully (in X as well as on a tty) - as it pointed out I typed the wrong password. But I could login just fine with the exact same password on a tty console.

I changed my account type setting back to administrator and voilà status quo restored.

Googling didn't yield any useful results besides some mailing list post mentioning "administrator" and "standard". The gnome documentation for this particular setting is non-existing.

Do you know what implications this setting has and why it was introduced?

Thanks,
Flo

wonder

Developer

From: Bucharest, Romania

Registered: 2006-07-05

Posts: 5,941

Website

Re: [Gnome 3] Misleading Administrator setting

i went upstream and asked about it. Turns out that administrator means adding that user to wheel group and anytime polkit wants an admin, it will accept a user in the wheel group as sufficient.

the sad thing is that policy is not upstream and is available in fedora. http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/gitweb/?p … =HEAD#l101

maybe we should implement that too

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Give what you have. To someone, it may be better than you dare to think.

BigZ

Member

Registered: 2010-06-07

Posts: 6

Re: [Gnome 3] Misleading Administrator setting

Thanks for your investigation.

One thing puzzled me: In the manuel[1] to GNU su it is stated, that the program doesn't check whether the user is in the wheel group or not. Now I've checked the patches applied by Arch, which introduce this feature.

[1]http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/m … ation.html