Myself and a few co-workers are bucking the trend and have switched to linux for our desktops. We choose RH9+XD2 so the newbees can cope and the NT-ish admins feel the corporate love.
My problem is I would like everyone to be able to run menu items for configuration tools(rehat-config-* and such) but the admins require we not know the root password on the boxes (case of w2k policy bleeding over into linux desktops).
I suspect I can make changes to the pam.d entries for these tools to allow a specific user or group to run these consolehelper-ized apps without prompting for the root password, but I can't find any good howtos for this. We have setup sudoer access for the users, but I don't want everyone to have to drop to console. I also don't want to have to modify application permissions (chmod/chown/suid/guid are out) or tweek the menu entries (gsu/gnome-sudo/xsu are out). I'm confident there is a solution in how they are setup in PAM.
Any ideas or experience here?
How does OSX setup it's Administrator accounts? Is there a hint there?