🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <49fk7m$9p1@news.smart.net>,
Tom McKearney <tmckearn@smarty.smart.net> so eloquently stated:
>Paul Mouritsen (mourip@cpcug.org) wrote:
>: Obviously I need to read some more about system administration but for now I 
>: am wondering if there is a simple way of giving root-like privileges to 
>: "mourip" so that I can log in as mourip and have all the blanket access that I 
>: have as root.
>
>: Any help would be appreciated.
>
>: Paul Mouritsen
>
>I wouldn't recommend this for most people, but you can go into the /etc/passwd
>file and find the entry that begins with mourip...
>
>something like 
>mourip:x:205:103:User Name:/home/mourip:/bin/ksh
>
>In this case you would want to replace 205 with 0.  0 is the User ID
>of root.  Effectively you would BE root, but the username would say mourip.
>This is kinda risky, because you will forget that you are root.  I recommend
>this ONLY for a short-term solution.  Be careful.

a better solution is to use the sudo command. this is a tool included with
slackware and available for other Linux systems. it allows you to setup a file
containing command permissions for groups, hosts and userids. you can, if you
wish, simply set the access levels for mourip to ALL and mourip would then be
able to exercise every tool on linux at root level, simply by prepending the
command with 'sudo'. it will then prompt you for your password (if you havent
used sudo within the timeout period). this has the effect of confirming that
you know the possible implications of typing 'sudo rm -rf /*'.

this is the tack i take with my system. i give PPP negotiation command rights
to MY user account so that i can connect my system without having to login as
root to do ONE command. i also do this with some of my administrative accounts
(namely my webmaster account) so that i can perform functions that might
require greater privs than the account normally has.

sudo also has the benefit that if you let others use your system, they never
need to know the root password to excercise the delegated root level commands.

-tom


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