Adjust Date & Time for all users

Phaethar · 11-26-2003, 03:04 PM

I'm looking for a way to allow a specific (or any) user to adjust the date and time without a password in RedHat 9. Specifically, we have a web server running, and the apache user needs access to update the date and time without being prompted for the root password. I can adjust the config file for redhat-config-date to prompt for the apache user's password instead of root, but this still causes problems. Is there a way to allow 1 specific user, other than root, to have full access to change this without a password?

dkaplowitz · 11-26-2003, 03:09 PM

I'm not sure about allowing a specific user to change the system time. All I can say, however, is that this is a terrible idea for many reasons. Why not just have the server sync using NTP so you know that the time is accurate? After that, you could probably have people run in their own time zone if they prefer, like GMT -5 or something.

Phaethar · 11-26-2003, 03:13 PM

Yeah, from a security standpoint, I understand it's not the best. But, this is only used internally, firewalled, for testing purposes. The date and time don't need to be correct as we are testing applications and need to make sure they run correctly on different days (weekends vs weekdays for example). Rather than having to manually set the date each time after entering a password, it would be much easier to be able to set and forget each time as this user.

Phaethar · 12-01-2003, 01:35 PM

TTT... any suggestions on how to allow other users to change the date and time?