users-admin removes privileges after deleting user

[Simon Andrews]

Binary package hint: gnome-system-tools

We create a temporary user during installation. Later we create the real users (some with admin privileges) and then delete the initially created user. We find that deleting the initial temp user causes other admins to be removed from many of the groups to which they were previously assigned (including admin).

Steps to reproduce:

1) Install dapper and create a temporary user 'temp'

2) After installation create a new user 'newuser' using users-admin with admin privileges (we also use a non-standard UID if this matters, something >13000)

3) Delete the initial temp user using users-admin and apply.

4) Look at /etc/group and see that newuser has been removed from most of the optional groups, including admin.

This has been reproduced on multiple machines which have been updated to the latest packages before the creation of the second user.

[William Grant (wgrant)]

Bug 51201 confirms this, as does a friend's experience. This is potentially disastrous for systems.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thanks for your bug. Do you do all this steps without restarting users-admin? With what user are you logged when you remove the 'temp' user, with 'temp' or with an another user?

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Seems to be fixed to edgy, marking as fixed

[Simon Andrews (simon-andrews)]

The sequence as far as I can remeber is:

1) Log in as temp

2) Create new user with admin privileges

3) Close users-admin and log out

4) Log in as newly created admin user

5) Delete temp

I'm sure it's this way round because at that point the user you're logged in as loses their admin privileges so you can even re-run users-admin to put back the privileges you just lost. You have to boot from a resuce disk to restore the permissions so there is an admin on the system again.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

opening a dapper backport task, fixed it to dapper-updates would be nice

Thank you for the update

[Charles Twardy (ctwardy)]

This is still a live issue. The active bug appears to be #26338: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-system-tools/+bug/26338.
Note, like many related bugs, the first posts are about some device not working (because of hal). The underlying problem, like here, is that users-admin is clobbering /etc/group. I'm going to mark this as a duplicate of #26338.