Group Admin, Group Root, or God over Group

crickett · 07-12-2004, 02:42 PM

I need to make a user that has permissions over a subset of users.
Please advise on how to approach this if it is possible.

Crickett

XavierP · 07-12-2004, 02:46 PM

What would this admin do? I can't think of anyway that this could be done - paswords and accounts are run as a whole by root. I don't think you can create a "limited admin" like that.

Crito · 07-12-2004, 03:06 PM

use gpasswd as root with the -A parameter to specify a group administrator. The group admin can manage membership and set a group password. users who aren't members can join the group with newgrp by entering the group password. and the best part is the group admin doesn't need root access to do any of this!

crickett · 07-12-2004, 03:47 PM

crito,

does that group admin have access to copy the group members files?

crickett · 07-12-2004, 03:53 PM

let me explain my motives....

i have a remote server
this server can't initiate conversations (firewall rules, DMZ)
i need to backup /home from the remote server
i can't ssh with root on remote server

i can use rdiff-backup user@remotehost::/home /local/bakcup/home
but the user doesn't have perms to all the other users in /home

i need a non root user that has perms to all or some users files

i can force a recursive chown -R :group /home first, but i'd rather not

i hope this helps you see what i'm trying to do...

Crito · 07-12-2004, 04:01 PM

I imagine that would depend on directory permission for group and other. The group admin doesn't have any other special rights that I'm aware of.

Oh, and on double checking, I should have said "group administrators" as there can be more than one. My book also mentions that this feature isn't implemented correctly in all versions of Linux. I can say definitively, however, that it works perfectly with Mandrake 9.2