Setting User Permissions
 

Hey guys,

I have a mandrake 10.1 box at home and I run suse 9.2 on my laptop but this is a question for really all distros. I primarily setup the mandrake box at home to share files, run apache and ssh. I know you're not supposed to log in with ssh using root but I use root to start/stop services.

I was wondering if there was a way I could setup user permissions on a certain user to start/stop services, like if I don't want ssh to run.......I am used to windwos and their various user settings, power users, administrors, domain admins etc etc. Any suggestions?

Not sure if I understand.

You would like to have a user to be able to start/stop services from a remote machine? I guess you could use sudo (see 'man sudo'), but still you need a terminal.

Why would you like to avoid using ssh? There is (to my knowledge) no safer alternative

You could ssh to your server using a normal user login, then su to root when you need to start any services.

SSH is a must, and sudo is the perfect tool. Once sudo is installed, users can sign in with their regular username and password. Then when they want to run a command as root, they just stick sudo in front of it. The machine will ask them for their password (not root's), and execute. With the config file you can set what commands are allowed to be run under sudo. It is great because you can use it to allow root level access without giving out your root password. It is great, and I strongly suggest using it.

Peace,
JimBass