first user created on the system needs to be in dip group

[Rolf Leggewie]

I hope base-installer is the correct package for this report. If not, please reassign.

The first user created during installation of the base system is in the dialout group among others. /usr/bin/pppd has group ownership of dip not dialout and this is by design. The first user needs to be added to dip group as well for proper functioning of pppd connections. This is a fairly long-standing problem.

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

For people affected by this ticket who have completed the installation process already, please add yourself to the dip group manually with "for user in $(whoami); do sudo adduser $user dip;done"

[Evgeniy (goujat)]

Why does pppd not use dialout group and does use dip?

I just googled for what the dip is.

"dip means Dialup IP . It was written by Fred van Kempen and has been patched very heavily by a number of people. Today there is one strain that is used by almost everyone: Version dip337p-uri , which is included with most modern Linux distributions, or is available from the metalab.unc.edu FTP archive."

Why do such a general software piece like pppd use the group which is named after some old crappy software? There's a special group named "dialout" which has to be used.

[Timo Jyrinki (timo-jyrinki)]

It seems for me this prevented usage of Mobile Broadband on oneiric via Network Manager. Is there some reason mobile broadband is working on new installs for some people, or is this really broken for everyone but not much reports?

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

This is easy enough to fix and can be quite troublesome in some cases for less experienced users. Let's make sure this is fixed in precise.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

This was fixed in user-setup 1.39ubuntu1:

    - Add the initial user to the dip group after all, not dialout; per
      Debian bug #568895, dip is for pppd and dialout is for raw tty access
      which users don't need.

(This is under "Dropped changes", but I've verified that that's merely syntactic ambiguity in the changelog, and the actual code does indeed now add the first user to the dip group.)

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

Thanks, Colin. Good to see this fixed.