I want to add new user and have/grant that new user to have all the root access, how can I do that ?
I did sudo adduser --system testuser
but this is not working as I expected.
Thanks for help.
linuxUbuntu
I want to add new user and have/grant that new user to have all the root access, how can I do that ?
I did sudo adduser --system testuser
but this is not working as I expected.
Thanks for help.
Best Answer
There are actually three ways you can do this: the right way, the wrong way, and the ugly way.
First, create a normal user account.
Then select one of the following:
The Right Way
Create a
sudo
entry for thewheel
group in/etc/sudoers
like this:Or for "modern" versions:
Then add the user to the
wheel
group. Adding and removing users with administrative priviledges now becomes a function of remembering to add them to wheel, instead of creating an entry in sudo. The great thing about using wheel is that you can extend this mechanism into other authentication schemes that support groups, i.e. winbind/Active Directory, and reap the benefits in the process. You would accomplish this by mapping wheel to a group in your authentication schema that has admin privileges.Note that some distributions use different administrative accounts. Wheel is a "traditional" approach to this, but you may encounter
admin
,adm
, and other group accounts that serve the same purpose.Follow-up Edit:
I have to give a point to Bart Silverstrim for pointing out that Ubuntu uses
admin
as the group for this purpose. He got to this first, although I didn't notice an Ubuntu tag at the time. Again, it all depends on what distribution your are using.The Ugly Way
Create a sudo entry for the user account in question and give then complete access. Again, you create the entry in
/etc/sudoers
like this:ADDED: ## For Ubuntu version: username ALL=(ALL:ALL)
This is great if you only have one (or two) normal accounts. It is ugly when you have a hundred accounts over multiple (geophysical) sites and have to constantly maintain the sudo file.
The Wrong Way
You can edit the
/etc/passwd
file and change the user account ID from whatever number it is, to0
. That's right, zero.See that third entry as zero? When you log into that account, you are, for all effective purposes,
root
. I do not recommend this. If you do not remember "who" you are, you can create all kinds of havoc as you start creating and touching files asroot
. You could also add your username to theroot
group. This has the same effect for file access but it creates other issues; programs will notice you are not userroot
and refuse to run, but you will gain access to files that belong to grouproot
.If you did this, you did use
vipw
instead of just editing withvi
, right? (or whatever your favorite text editor is) After all, a single typo in this file can lock you out of your system - and that means a physical visit to the computer in question with a repair disc...