Group 'admin' gid problem

[Edward Lee]

On Fri, 2009-07-17 at 11:26 +0100, Max Bowsher wrote:
> Edward Lee wrote:
> > My issue with this is that the 'admin' group, which is used by sudo to
> > control who can administer the system as root, is not one of those
> > groups < 100.
> 
> But that's just a matter of configuration in the sudoers file. You could
> reconfigure it to trust a fixed group of your choice as well / instead.
Well, I just got back to my computer, and I tested out the gconf tool
using your method.  Apparently, the gconf 'Admin authentication' option
checks for membership in the 'admin' group, which means that this option
won't work too well in the GNOME configuration tools.   
-Ed
> 
> > BTW, why are there two 'administrator' groups -> 'adm' and 'admin'?
> 
> adm is not an administrator group per se - its purpose is to grant
> read-only access to "administrative information" (i.e. /var/log/
> logfiles) that otherwise only root has access to.
> 
> Max.
>