Bug#450954: Username 'admin' is reserved

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org>]

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]