Wheel group?

[Rick Johnson]

Craig White wrote:
<snip>

> ----
> To my knowledge, the wheel group is commonly used as a super-user group
> on BSD and is pretty much not involved in Linux stuff except that you
> may want to use NIS type of UID/GID designations. Linux uses other
> groups such as adm/disk for these types of elevated privileges.

I generally use it to grant su privileges as well as sudo privileges. 
Only members of the wheel group can use su, and only members of wheel 
can use sudo.

Inside /etc/pam.d/su:

# Uncomment the following line to require a user to be in the "wheel" group.
#auth       required     /lib/security/$ISA/pam_wheel.so use_uid

If you uncomment - only wheel members can "su".

Alternately the line above that group can implicitly trust users who are 
members of that group - great for internal systems with controlled 
access - but a nightmare on any other machine - especially if the 
account member has a simple/weak password.

Inside /etc/sudoers:

# Uncomment to allow people in group wheel to run all commands
#%wheel  ALL=(ALL)       ALL

If you uncomment - people within wheel can run sudo (using a password) 
to execute commands as root. There's another set below which could do 
the same w/o requiring a password - again see comments above.

Other than that, I don't see much other use for it - but I'm sure some 
files in the file system are group owned by wheel which may grant 
members additional rights w/o being root.

HTH,
-Rick
-- 
Rick Johnson, RHCE #807302311706007 - rjohnson at medata.com
Linux/Network Administrator - Medata, Inc.
PGP Public Key: https://mail.medata.com/pgp/rjohnson.asc