reassign 450954 user-setup
severity 450954 minor
tags 450954 wontfix
thanks

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).

This means that although admin is not actually used in a default
installation, having it already in use could cause problems if that
particular Debian package is installed later.
Therefore we prefer to list it as "reserved" to prevent its accidental use,
but you are of course free to ignore that and create the account manually
after installation (as you've already done).

Tagging the report "won't fix", but leaving it open as others may disagree.

Cheers,
FJP



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(Cc Colin Watson to get attention)

Quoting Frans Pop (elendil@planet.nl):
> reassign 450954 user-setup
> severity 450954 minor
> tags 450954 wontfix
> thanks
>
> 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".



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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]



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Quoting Colin Watson (cjwatson@debian.org):

> 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.


I personnally think it wouldn't be good to diverge on this. I think we
all benefit from the differences between Debian and Ubuntu installer
being as close as possible.

I therefore suggest we keep admin as a reserved login, but better
document this in th reserved-usernames file.


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