re-enabling root and disabling plain user

[Paul Sladen]

On Wed, 6 Apr 2005, MER wrote:

Hello Marc,

> How can I set things so only the root password is demanded when
> accessing and admin task (and my default user denied from doing it)?

There are two parts here:

  (a) changing the system to use 'su' instead of 'sudo'
  (b) disabling your user from being able to use 'sudo'

Part (b) is easy.  Just remove yourself from the 'adm' group and you'll
loose sudo privileges.

Part (a) is going to be incredibly hard.  You may be able to do something
evil and replace/symlink 'gksudo' to 'gksu', but Ubuntu has had to make alot
of changes to bring the Linux and GNOME desktop up-to-date and ensure
everything works with sudo;  that has included fixing and translating all
the dialogue boxes where necessary.

There are some scripts that operate as follows:

  gksudo 'Please enter you password to make this change
  sudo command1...
  sudo command2...

Here, the 'gksudo' is effectively to ''cache the password'' (enable sudo
access for 5minutes), then the actual commands are executed using sudo
itself---and so they pro-actively rely on 'sudo' facilities.

> Should I just remove the adm group from my main user, or will that wreck
> havoc?

That will just stop your current user from being able to sudo ("Part (b)").  

If you wanted to allow a choice between 'sudo' and 'su'-style administration
policies, then a long-term way might be to check whether you have ''sudo
rights'' and if not, to offer a root password dialogue.  However, this is
probably a bad idea for the general use case, 1-2 users have admin/sudo
privileges and the rest don't (so you don't want to be offering them *any*
kind of dialogue box except to tell them that they can't...).

> I want to make my Ubuntu box behave like a "classic" linux box when it
> comes to admin tasks privileges.

We'd like Ubuntu to work for as many people as possible.  Could you further
describe the situation that is causing you to want to use a 'root' account?

	-Paul
-- 
I didn't know it snowed here!  Groningen, NL