Re: [gentoo-user] su doesn't work for me.

[Alan McKinnon]

Apparently, though unproven, at 00:32 on Monday 11 April 2011, Mark Shields 
did opine thusly:

> On Sun, Apr 10, 2011 at 10:08 AM, Alan McKinnon
<alan.mckinnon@×××××.com>wrote:
> > Apparently, though unproven, at 16:28 on Sunday 10 April 2011, Dale did
> > opine
> >
> > thusly:
> > > > That was it!  I've now got su-ability from that normal user.
> > > >
> > > > Funny, though, on my (very) old Debian system I don't seem to have a
> > > > wheel.
> > > >
> > > > Thanks.
> > > >
> > > >> Best regards,
> > > >> Yann
> > >
> > > I think that is a Gentoo thing.  It does add some security if you don't
> > > want a user, like maybe some little kid, getting root access for any
> > > reason.
> >
> > No, it's pretty standard across Unix.
> >
> > The BSD's for example have had it since forever - members of the wheel
> > group
> > being allowed to sudo anything only came along much later.
> >
> > Leaving it *out* is a Linux-distro thing, probably from the usual usage
> > case
> > for Linux for many years - a server on the web that actually only had one
> > user
> > even though it was capable of being fully multi-user. The concept of
> > wheel for
> > su is pretty redundant in that case.
> >
> >
> > --
> > alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
>
> Wheel has nothing to do with su; it has everything to do with sudo, but
> only if /etc/sudoers is edited to allow the Wheel group sudo access.  Su
> is for changing to a different user, or running a command as another user;
> doing either requires the password of that user; sudo, on the other hand,
> only requires your password, if you're in the wheel group and the wheel
> group is given full sudo access, and the sudo access for wheel requires
> your password.
>
> Some examples, assuming your user (the one you're logged in as) is in wheel
> and requires a password for sudo access (see: visudo):
>
> sudo su  <--- escalates you to root user with your own password.  This is
> running "su" with "sudo".
> su user <--- switches to "user" with their password required to be entered
> sudo su user < -- switch to "user" with your password required to be
> entered sudo <command> <-- runs command as root
> sudo -u user <command> <--- runs command as "user"
> sudo su - user <--- escalates you to "user" and cd's to their home
> directory
>
> Please read the man pages for sudo and su for more info.

Mark,

You know better than that. Re-read my post, I said that *Unix*, most 
especially the BSDs, have had a concept of wheel for, well, since almost when 
Unix started. sudo came much later and for sudo, wheel is naturally a very 
useful pre-existing thing to use.

If Linux distros, maintainers or the GNU folk chose to not implement wheel 
membership as a prerequisite for su, then that's fine. They can do what they 
want with their stuff but it doesn't change the fact that other operating 
systems can, and do, do it differently.

I have read man su and man sudo. Many times. I see that the ones I have are 
very Linux-centric.

Google "wheel su" for more info, keeping in mind that Linux != Unix




-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com