Bug#450954: Username 'admin' is reserved

On Tue, Nov 13, 2007 at 06:14:36AM +0000, Christian Perrier wrote:
> Quoting Frans Pop (elendil@planet.nl):
> > On Monday 12 November 2007, Bill West wrote:
> > > When setting up the user account, the username 'admin' was rejected
> > > as being 'reserved' in Debian Etch.
> >
> > According to the comments in the list of reserved user names, admin is
> > included because it's a "Other miscellaneous system users/groups created by
> > common packages".
> > I don't know exactly which common package creates admin (I suspect some
> > database package).
>
> From the changelog comment when this was added:
>
> [ Colin Watson ]
> * Detect and error out on reserved usernames, i.e. those that are already
> used by some parts of the system. Unfortunately there's no particularly
> straightforward way to identify a reserved username, and the only way I
> can think of is to maintain a blacklist; so I've collated this from the
> base-passwd master files and those user and group names I found on some
> of my systems. Feel free to extend this as the need arises.
>
> So, Colin might tell this if he can find the systems he was looking at
> when he did that change and he can find the information about which
> package is using "admin".

Ubuntu creates the admin group and adds the first user to it in order to grant them sudo privileges. I forgot to comment this in the reserved-usernames file at the time.

If you want to diverge on this, you can remove it if you like and I can always add it back in for Ubuntu. It'll screw anyone who tries to sidegrade to Ubuntu though.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson@debian.org]



-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-boot-REQUEST@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org