Sudo and wheel group

NotionCommotion · 03-16-2014, 03:09 PM

I've never understood what some of the groups are all about. One in particular was the wheel group.

I recently played with sudo for the first time, and in the configuration file, it has the wheel group what seems to have root access.

If I am the only user of the server and wish to add sudo status to my normal username, should I add me to the wheel group? Is this the purpose of the wheel group?

Thanks

EDDY1 · 03-16-2014, 03:21 PM

The wheel group in sudo is a little different than a regular sudoer as you can add users to a certain wheel group which has only access to that groups projects with hardly, very little or no access to root.
Whereas your user can be listed under sudo & given full açcess to root.

NotionCommotion · 03-16-2014, 04:14 PM

Thanks Eddie,

The visudo file includes the following line. Are they not suggesting that members of the wheel group should have full access?

Code:

# %wheel  ALL=(ALL)       ALL

EDDY1 · 03-16-2014, 05:40 PM

My bad you are correct.
Sudo can is more configureable.
http://linuxpoison.blogspot.com/2008...rs-to.html?m=1

NotionCommotion · 03-16-2014, 07:11 PM

Thanks Eddie,

Per your referenced post, looks like wheel group is historically just for this use.

Quote:

The wheel group is a legacy from UNIX. When a server had to be maintained at a higher level than the day-to-day system administrator, root rights were often required. The 'wheel' group was used to create a pool of user accounts that were allowed to get that level of access to the server. If you weren't in the 'wheel' group, you were denied access to root.

EDDY1 · 03-16-2014, 11:16 PM

Yes it is legacy but with only 1 user you can just add your username to /etc/sudoers & it's customizable