Multiple users and lpadmin group

[Frank616]

I did some fresh installs this past week on some home machines. One of the machines has multiple accounts on it.

I used my wife's account (1002 - after Guest and frank) to set up her machine, making sure I made her account part of the sudo group so that I could administer it from her account. I failed to add her to the lpadmin group. I could not use the KDE control center to set up a printer. It kept challenging my right to do so, popping up a box showing root as the user, and asking for the root password. Tried CUPS in a browser as well, but no change. The 'buntus do not enable root, so there is no root password. I was therefore stopped dead in my tracks. I even tried opening the control center from a root shell with kdesudo. That didn't work either, which really had me stumped.

In trying to find out what was wrong, I moved to my account on that machine, and did set up a printer with no problem. After checking the difference between the two accounts, I discovered my failure to add her to the lpadmin group.

Interesting that not even a root shell would get me past that. sudo must have some limitations if used from a user account.

I have always, in the past, enabled the root account, and used it to do administrative duties when needed. There is a second advantage to that in that the root password then becomes different from the user account password using sudo. One does not then need to enable sudo for the user account, effectively preventing the user from messing up a machine by mistake. I have gotten away from that in recent years because 'conventional wisdom' tends to use sudo. And quite honestly, it takes more time to set up a root account.

I may have to rethink that.

Frank.

[vinnywright]

Ssoooooo ,,did you finally get around to adding her to the lpadmin group ?

VINNY

[Frank616]

Vinny:

Had to.

The point is that I did not realize what the lpadmin group WAS until it was not there. The basic 'template' for users and groups in Kubuntu in the past has not caused me any troubles -- until now.

Live and learn.

Frank.

[Frank616]

Vinny:

And, btw, this is again one of the advantages of having a REAL root account. Ain't NOTHIN' you can't do there.

Frank.

[vinnywright]

Vinny:

And, btw, this is again one of the advantages of having a REAL root account. Ain't NOTHIN' you can't do there.

Frank.

something like

sudo usermod -a -G group user

where "group" is lpadmin and "user" her user name ,,,,would have done it.........with a log out and back in.

provided she was in the "sudo" group already.

VINNY

[Frank616]

Vinny:

Thanks. However, it is not a case of not knowing how to add her to the lpadmin group. I can do it with KUser, which I always install. The issue was KNOWING that her user account had to be part of lpadmin. It is not set as default for any account other than the FIRST one created, which was mine.

Note the first line of information after the end of the table here:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/Privileges

While this has been the case for a long time, I was unaware of it.

Frank.

[oshunluvr]

At least some of the info on that page is incorrect, so use caution...

...for example, /etc/cups/cups.conf no longer contains a "SystemGroup" setting.

[Frank616]

At least some of the info on that page is incorrect, so use caution...

Thanks. It is hard to keep up with all the changes that all the devs put so much effort into.

I only found it by researching lpadmin, and why it made a difference. It was then that I found out why MY account worked, and my wife's didn't. My account, being the first, got handed lpadmin privileges by the default install, but that same default install did NOT give them to my wife. Like I say, first time I have noticed this, and the first time that the system has prevented me from doing something when using sudo. It was unexpected.

Other than that, I have never used that page, and quite likely never will.

Frank.