Another reason to prefer a real root over sudo

Rashkae ubuntu at tigershaunt.com
Thu Feb 5 15:00:02 UTC 2009


Chris G wrote:

> I'm not sure when I raised it I'm afraid.  I think it must have been
> fairly recently (i.e. since 8.10 was released) but I'm not absolutely sure.
> 
> Anyway, the issue is that you run services-admin (from the command
> line or via the menus) when you click on Unlock it asks for your
> *user* password not the root password.  Since the user doesn't have
> sudo privileges this doesn't work.
> 
> Actually the above doesn't seem to be the case any more, the problem
> is the other way around.  I just tried running services-admin and, as
> expected, it asked for my user password.  When I gave it *my* password
> it unlocked successfully which it shouldn't have done, I'm not in the
> sudoers file.
> 

You are in the @admin group, and again, this is all to do with the
policy-kit, and nothing to do with sudo,, if you want to run
services-admin, sudo it yourself.

sudo services-admin  (or su -p services-admin, if you prefer)

or create a launcher that does it.  If you launch services-admin as a
user, expect to be at the mercy of the policy-kit, which, if you ever
run the gnome-policy-kit configuration program, you will see lets you
fine grain control over which users can access each and every individual
policy-kit enabled control.




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