Wheel Group

ronin16 · 12-12-2007, 05:34 PM

I am running a red hat 5 enterprise server. Looking at the "groups" on the server. What is the 'wheel' group and what access does it give users?

Thanks,

Paul

anomie · 12-12-2007, 05:43 PM

AFAIK, on a default RHEL installation the wheel group does not serve any purpose.

But you can put some PAM changes into place to make RHEL behave like a BSD system would with the wheel group. Upon making these changes, only users in the wheel group are able to use su to get root access.

I wrote a howto long ago on this topic (on a SuSE forum, back when it was called SuSE). Maybe someone can dig something up for you if you're interested.