Bug 811

Summary:	su to root does not work without wheel group
Product:	Gentoo Linux	Reporter:	Matt Piechota <piechota>
Component:	[OLD] Core system	Assignee:	Daniel Robbins (RETIRED) <drobbins>
Status:	RESOLVED FIXED
Severity:	normal
Priority:	Normal
Version:	1.0 RC6 r14
Hardware:	x86
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Package list:		Runtime testing required:	---

Description Matt Piechota 2002-02-22 17:53:24 UTC

No user is able to su to root unless a wheel group is added to the /etc/group file, and users are 
added to the group.  I'm using wheel to be a second gid 0 group (group root is the first one), but 
it appears that it could be any gid (it works with 1002, for example).  I realize this is standard 
behavior for BSD style su, but there's no mention of the wheel group in the man page.

If I were fixing this bug, I'd either add a default group of wheel, or have the source for su look for 
group root instead of wheel.

Comment 1 Daniel Robbins (RETIRED) gentoo-dev

2002-02-22 18:50:02 UTC

You mean a wheel group with gid 0?

Comment 2 Matt Piechota 2002-02-23 11:36:41 UTC

It works as long as there is a group called wheel, regardless of what gid it is.  Traditionally in BSD it's gid 0 (and there's no group named root), but it doesn't seem to matter to su if wheel is some other gid.

Comment 3 Daniel Robbins (RETIRED) gentoo-dev

2002-02-27 00:37:40 UTC

we should have a default group of wheel.  Yes, we do.  marking as "worksforme"