Add user as sudoer
Somebody asked why adding a user to the wheel
group in didn’t enable them as a sudoer, as qualified in my earlier Fedora post. The reason is that you also need to modify the primary group in the /etc/passwd
file to specify the Group ID value for the wheel
group as the primary group of the designated student
user.
You can identify the Group ID with the following command:
cat /etc/group | grep wheel |
It should return the following for the wheel
group:
wheel:x:10:student |
You need to check the target student
user in the /etc/passwd
file, which you can do with the following command:
cat /etc/passwd | grep student |
It should return the following for the student
user, which has a default group value equal to the user of the same name:
student:x:1000:1000:Student:/home/student:/bin/bash |
As the root
user, edit the /etc/passwd
file to correct the student
user’s primary group ID, as follows:
student:x:1000:10:Student:/home/student:/bin/bash |
You should see the following two lines. If you want authorized sudoers to provide a password (recommended), then modify the first line by removing the #
comment. If you don’t want authorized sudoers to provide a password, modify the second line by removing the #
comment. Open the /etc/sudoers
file with vi
or gedit
if you’d like a GUI editor.
# %wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL # %wheel ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL |
Hope this helps. It’s a quick update for Fedora 30, you su
to root
and add your user to the sudoers
list with the following syntax:
usermod someusername -a -G wheel |
By the way, don’t forget to log off and then back on to the account.