On Mon, 6 Mar 2017 19:36:40 +0000 Brian <a...@cityscape.co.uk> wrote:
> On Mon 06 Mar 2017 at 18:59:18 +0000, Joe wrote: > > > On Mon, 6 Mar 2017 13:40:45 -0500 > > Greg Wooledge <wool...@eeg.ccf.org> wrote: > > > > > On Mon, Mar 06, 2017 at 06:31:46PM +0000, Joe wrote: > > > > Debian appears to use the group 'sudo' as an administrative > > > > group, where some other distributions use 'wheel'. > > > > > > > > I would not have thought that users would be added to it by > > > > default, there are no members on my sid/xfce4 workstation. > > > > Indeed, up to Jessie, sudo was not installed at all by default, > > > > and may still not be. > > > > > > If you use the regular Debian installer, the user account that you > > > create during installation gets added to a lot of these special > > > groups (sudo, cdrom, floppy, audio, video, ...?). Users that you > > > create post-installtion using adduser or useradd do not. > > > > > > > New behaviour, then, my current sid was installed as wheezy, I added > > sudo manually early on, but as it was not installed by default, it > > would not have added the installing user to a sudo group. I'm > > certainly not a member of that group, and have no wish to be. > > The "first user" is not in the sudo group. The place to check this > is the templates file in the user-setup-udeb package. > > > Possibly I'm missing something, but doesn't this repeat the Windows > > mistake of automatically giving the user admin privileges? Isn't > > that the main reason for the existence of so many Windows viruses? > > Look at it this way. The "first user" wishes to set up a printer. Is > it better for the user to be granted very limited privileges by being > in the lpadmin group or to become root to carry out the task? > Who said anything about lpadmin? The question is about the wisdom of automatically including someone in the sudo group, which in a default Debian sudoers file, gives full root privileges to everything, using the user's password. We have someone saying this happens, someone else saying it doesn't, I don't know as I haven't done a recent installation, and the thread was started by someone who says it did happen to him. -- Joe
