Shutdown is under the control of PAM  (Permissions access module?)

If you look at /usr/bin/shutdown you will see it is in fact a symlink to an 
application called 'consolehelper'

Consolehelper is a wrapper which looks at the name of the symlink it was 
called from (in this case shutdown) and looks it up in /etc/pam.d
If it finds a file in there with the same name as the symlink it applies the 
authentication tests it finds there. If authentication passes consolehelper 
will pass control over to the requested application. ( /sbin/shutdown)

/etc/pam.d/shutdown contains :-

#%PAM-1.0
auth       sufficient   /lib/security/pam_rootok.so
auth       required     /lib/security/pam_console.so
#auth       required    /lib/security/pam_stack.so service=system-auth
account    required     /lib/security/pam_permit.so

In your case I think it is the last line which is stopping you running 
shutdown. Probably because of your security level.  If you ask for high 
security, then that is what you get :)

derek



On Tuesday 15 Oct 2002 11:50 am, Roman Korcek wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> > I don't know if its just my level of security or what, but the
> > options to logout, halt, and reboot don't show up when I logout of
> > KDE in Mandrake Linux 9.0.  I previously had RedHat Linux 7.3
> > installed, and the options were  there.  What am I missing?  Is
> > there a security level that will trigger those options to disappear?
> > I have the  "Higher" security setting on right now.
> >
> > This isn't tearing me apart, but its rather annoying...
>
> I have a very similar question - in 9.0 I can't run shutdown as a
> regular user anymore - says command not found. So I guessed it's in
> /sbin which isn't in a regular user's path so I typed /sbin/shutdown
> -r now but bash said only root can do that. Shutdown has r-x
> permission for all, so, I wonder, what setting/file do I need to
> change in order to be able to run shutdown as a regular user?


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