Comment 56 for bug 26338

Thanks.

I sent this note over to the developer at Ubuntu who owns this bug. He may
or may not be contacting you,

On 9/4/07, zoobloik <email address hidden> wrote:
>
> Hi
> I just installed Xubuntu 7.04 onto an old-ish laptop (that was previously
> running an old release of slackware linux). The initial install wasn't too
> painful (aside from problems with the disk partitioner returning failure
> codes numerously, and the fact that the GUI network configurator didn't seem
> to accomodate ad-hoc WLAN setup which meant me manually poking at the
> /etc/network/interfaces file)...
>
> However, I too have just experienced the problem met by various other
> people in this thread. After the full initial installation, my first
> port of call was to add a new 'basic' user so that my family could do
> basic login and have access to web-browsing etc...
>
> so.. i used the GUI tool, went in and selected the add user option, filled
> out the details of the user then 'OK'd' everything. once i'd done this, i
> logged out of xfce and then tried to login as the newly created user... i
> was met with an error trying to log in saying that the account could not be
> validated.. so i then logged in as my 'initial installation' user account to
> try see what was going on. After logging in as the initial user.. i tried to
> run the GUI user accounts tool again.. it prompted me for the administrative
> password to access the utility.. i put in my usual password and was then met
> with an error saying that i was not allowed to run this utility... to my
> horror i subsequently discovered that i could not 'sudo' at all with this
> account...
> what seemed to be particularly drastic is that for some reason I noticed
> that files in the /etc folder that would normally be root/root (i.e.
> user/group of root) now seemed to have the ownership of (root/newuser) where
> newuser was the uid of the account i had just tried to add (which did not
> get added correctly) with the GUI tool....
>
> as a stop-gap i have booted the live cd and i added my initial login to
> the sudoers file as an 'ALL=(ALL) ALL' entry.. so i could actually be
> productive again, and i once again ran the GUI user/group maintenance tool..
> upon going in here this time i observed that indeed a new group had been
> added for the account i tried to set up... trying to remove this made the
> tool complain that it was an administrator group, therefore i can only
> imagine that it had relabelled the root group??
> i renamed this new group back to 'root' and i tried to add the user once
> again with the tool and this time it seemed to add the user.
>
> since ubuntu seems 'weird' in its use of the root account and my
> unfamiliarity with ubuntu, are the files that are retained for
> administrator access (which are normally root/root on other linux
> distros) also meant to be root/root in ubuntu? or is the group for these
> meant to be something else?
>
> p.s. i'm still not sure if this stuff has caused any other havoc at
> all... but to say such a fundamental tool can screw up so badly is a
> pretty poor show really.. since i'm not a linux expert i've no idea to
> what extent it has screwed stuff up and how it may have compromised my
> system security.
>
> Its not something i plan to spend major amounts of time on as the
> install was simply to be put on a laptop to allow my family access to
> internet etc through WLAN... once that is setup i dont plan on touching
> it much for a while..
>
> i'd like to know how this could be so defective though...
>
> --
> Adding a user to a group modifies other users' groups and passwords
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/26338
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of a duplicate bug.
>