=== Summary ===
I've just reviewed the duplicates, and marked a few others as duplicates. The
problem seems to be that the graphical users-admin tool has some SEVERE bugs
that make a system unusable and insecure. It makes several unintended changes
to /etc/group under various conditions, including:
* stripping group membership from all/many accounts when adding a new user
* allowing non-admin accounts to change the root password
* deleting accounts other than the selected one (?)
Bug #64698 has a good statement of one manifestation.
Symptoms include:
* User no longer in sudoers (because no longer in admin)
* Network failures (because haldaemon is no longer in appropriate groups)
* Sound failures (because user and haldaemon are no longer in audio)
* USB and other devices no longer working (haldaemon again)
* Gnome login problems (audio? hal? networking?)
Very likely this bug is causing a whole host of mysterious bugs that
never got tracked back to /etc/group, because the symptoms are
apparently unrelated.
One method to recover:
* Reboot to "recovery" mode (a.k.a. single-user)
* Edit /etc/group:
* add the appropriate accounts to "admin" and "audio" (etc) again
* add "haldaemon" to: cdrom, floppy, audio, plugdev, powerdev (maybe
others, but that's what I found)
I am attaching my reconstructed /etc/group, to help people recover. I
_appear_ to have everything working again (sound, network, gnome login,
sudo) though I may yet have missed something, or your system may have
other bits. It's been slightly anonymized -- users "daffy", "bugs",
"marvin" and "donald" are fictitious. Hope this helps.
Other possibilities including reinstalling hal and/or udev to reset
those permissions. (sudo aptitude reinstall hal hal-device-manger).
Mind you, I'm deleting "users-admin" from my system for now.
** Attachment added: "Fixed-up /etc/group file"
http://launchpadlibrarian.net/8449978/group
** Attachment removed: "Fixed-up /etc/group file"
http://launchpadlibrarian.net/8449978/group
--
Adding a user to a group modifies other users' groups and passwords
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/26338
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