No admin menus with NIS users

[Jim Louvau]

Logging on as a local user (created at install) gives me the expected "admin" entries under the System->Administration menu like Synaptic and software updates.
When logged on as a network user (NIS) all of the "administrative" type entries are gone from the menus. The NIS ID's netgroup is in sudoers (and can indeed sudo) and is a member of adm, admin, etc (same list of groups as the local user with the same GID's). I'm at a loss as to why menu entries are missing. FWIW this same setup works fine in Breezy.

[Jim Louvau (jlouvau)]

FWIW I just confirmed that the software updater is running in the background and DOES notify me (as a NIS user) that there are new updates and lets me download and install them as advertised. So the apps seem to work, there just aren't any menu entries because the system doesn't "think" I'm an admin.

[Irios (irios)]

This surely has to do with the fact that NIS users don't get sound either.

[Jim Louvau (jlouvau)]

The sound issue has to do with group membership. The only users that get "sound" are members of the audio group. You would have to set up nis to allow passing low GIDs and make the user on the server a member of audio (gid 29). Ubuntu (Debian) use a whole bunch of these... You need to be a member of "cdrom" to use CDs, "dialout" to use a modem, "plugdev" to use removable media like pen drives. This is a PITA with NIS because you have to manually add users to a bunch of groups and potentially dangerous since you need to export the low GIDs. Not a biggie on my home network, but... LDAP should handle these issues much more elegantly, but in its current form, it's a pain to set up, administer and use in a SOHO environment (read: overkill). Unfortunately, adding your NIS user to "admin" doesn't get you the menus, apparently because access to them is granted or denied locally BEFORE the NIS GIDs have been checked. All of the others (cdrom, plugdev, etc. work if mapped).

[Kevin Conover (kconover-deactivatedaccount)]

this might be a little out of date but 1) I can confirm the menus still don't show up in a NIS set up and 2) the groups for audio, etc, I took care of in /etc/security/group.conf with: gdm;*;*;Al0000-2400;cdrom,floppy,video,audio,plugdev

[Sean Farrell (rioki)]

If you add your nis user to the admin group in etc /etc/group then it works. (At least for me.) I added the nis user(s) to all groups the initial user was added. I have seen a bug report that it dose not work with the admin group over the network, I can nither confirm nor deny that case. With local system groups and remote users it works.

On a side note I keep the initial user as administrator in case of network failure. That is way safer than using the real root.

[Daniel Holbach (dholbach)]

That doesn't really sounds like a GNOME bug. Can anybody elaborate what could be changed to resolve the issue?

[Daniel Holbach (dholbach)]

Your bug lacks information we would need to investigate further. We
are now going to close the bug - please reopen if you have more
information at hand.