MacLochlainns Weblog

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.