Users and group membership

Question

My server is installed by my provider with a default user (root and another user, lets say here johndoe). I lack some experience to know if everything is well set. Let's say I add the group admin. Then I need to add johndoe to this group. I end up with the following when I read /etc/group :

...
**johndoe**:x:1000:
...
admin:x:1001:**johndoe**

This numbers, with the letters… I just don't have a clue. The admin's group is set with the following :

%admin ALL=(ALL)       ALL

I need to give johndoe the most privileges possible; do I have anything else to do? Hope my question is not too random.

Answer 1

Understanding that %admin ALL=(ALL) ALL is in /etc/sudoers file, there are three ways of gaining root privileges:

1. In order to execute a command with root privileges you should run sudo command.

2. To open a shell with root privileges but environment variables from johndoe you can invoke sudo -s.

3. Also, if you really want to run a root console (with environment variables of root user) you can execute sudo su - and you will have a root shell.