Simplifying Admin Tasks in openSUSE with the Wheel Group
Quoting: Simplifying Admin Tasks in openSUSE with the Wheel Group – CubicleNate's Techpad —
Something I wish I had fully understood, long ago, when setting up admin privileges with any Linux or specifically openSUSE systems is how to make it work in a more slick, usable and friendly manner. I specifically like the default Ubuntu approach to managing sudo behavior. When you “sudo” you enter your user password to do root or admin privilege tasks. In contrast, on openSUSE the default is to enter the root password. For a single user setup, this is not a problem but on a multi-user deployment this behavior is not very convenient. I just don’t think it is a a good approach to give the various users root password to do administrative functions. Although I did some cursory searching, I didn’t find an answer that was clear enough for me to implement so I did the shameful thing and just provide the root credentials to the small team of individuals I am working with, but that is no more!
This is my solution for making root / admin tasks much cleaner and easier to accomplish for those that are tasked to do so in this environment. I don’t claim to be a security expert and there are potentially even better ways to manage this but for my small team, I am taking advantage of the “wheel” group by adding the users to that group and modifying the sudoer file to allow any user with that group administrative privileges. It is much easier to remove a user from the group than to change the root password. I also don’t particularly like the whole root user thing to do system tasks. Feel free to comment and criticize on this and maybe I’ll change my ways.