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@xxxxxxxxxx Linux/Network Administrator - Medata, Inc. PGP Public Key: https://mail.medata.com/pgp/rjohnson.asc
