On Jun 17, 2009, at 2:31 PM, Sue Sivets wrote:
Is there any way to give a user the ability to shutdown and reboot a
Suse z/linux system without giving him the root password? In simple
terms, one of my users is asking for the root password so he can
reboot
the machine when he needs to because the project he's working on has
crashed and generally caused a lot of problems. I found a couple of
notes from 2007 that were about a shutdown userid on a Redhat system.
Will something like that work on a Suse10 system, or is there a better
way of accomplishing what I need? If it will work, can someone tell me
what I need to do in order to make it work?
I was thinking about using SU, but as far as I know, he would still
need
the root password, and then I'm back where I started. Is there a way
to
give him some kind of alternate root password that doesn't open up
the
whole ball of wax?
If anyone has any other ideas, I would really like to hear them. I
really don't want to give out the root password if I can avoid it.
The sudo command is built for situations like yours. Create an /etc/
sudoers file that allows use of /sbin/reboot and /sbin/shutdown (if
that's where they in fact are) for certain users.
Adam
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