[501] in athena10
Re: Suggested amendments to the Athena10 docs.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Tim Abbott)
Tue Sep 16 17:31:48 2008
Date: Tue, 16 Sep 2008 17:31:35 -0400 (EDT)
From: Tim Abbott <tabbott@MIT.EDU>
To: Jonathan Reed <jdreed@mit.edu>
cc: William Cattey <wdc@mit.edu>, athena10@mit.edu
In-Reply-To: <E7F7FC88-2EE8-4CED-B48A-672056B68474@mit.edu>
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.1.10.0809161728400.1869@vinegar-pot.mit.edu>
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On Tue, 16 Sep 2008, Jonathan Reed wrote:
>
> On Sep 16, 2008, at 4:49 PM, Tim Abbott wrote:
>> Sorry, I should have been more clear in my question.
>>
>> The current Debathena nsswitch setup does not allow you to add a nonlocal
>> (i.e. Athena) user to a local group. So, my guess is that what is
>> happening here is that you deleted the local wdc user, and then you tried
>> to add the (nonlocal) wdc user to the local admin group, which is prevented
>> in a way that I would expect to potentially result in a usage message.
>
>
> Uh, really? That kind of sucks. We've been operating under the assumption
> that the right thing to do is add an Athena user to the local admin group, so
> that they can
>
> a) sudo
> b) Have the little update notifier thing in the panel run.
>
> Also, it seems to work just fine on my Athena 10 machine as described. If
> there is no way for an Athena user to be added to the admin group, then we
> need to completely rethink a lot of things in documentation. Also, if this
> is the case, why was it not pointed out a month ago that the documentation is
> incorrect?
I think you used usermod, not adduser when you wrote the documentation;
usermod I believe is incorrectly not affected by this.
There are ways -- it's just that the adduser command isn't one of them.
adduser.debathena-orig wdc admin
would work (you can read /usr/sbin/adduser.debathena to get a hint of
what's going on here). Ther'es a prettier ways too.
-Tim Abbott
