I was asked to create a special user that is capable of shutting down our Sun servers in case of emergency (such as power outage). As far as I know, only a root user can run the "sutdown" script. Is there a way to enable a regular user to run the shutdown command? I don't want to give out the root password, so they can't su as root. Any advice will be appreciated!

You will want to use the tool "sudo" for that. You can give accounts rights to run specific commands with it. Tons of info online about using sudo, just try google and I'm sure you'll be able to find all you need.

thanx, I'll give it a try.

or you can create a root user called "shutdown" with it's own password but only has the required shutdown commands in it's $HOME/.profile ... you still have to protect the password from regular users but at least you get to do what you were asked )

The shutdown user is a simple way of doing this, and works quite well.

Thanks everyone for help! I set up a shutdown user and gave him sudo rights to the shutdown script. I also created $HOME/.profile file that calls shutdown upon user login, and it works fine. I decided no to create a root user for this purpose.

I discovered a strange anomaly though. First I was trying to set up /etc/passwd to call a script with the shutdown command instead of a shell for the shutdown user, but for some weird reason it doesn't work on Solaris 9 box. The runlevel changes to whatever I tell it to (such as 6), but the system remains up and running. Really weird. It worked on a Solaris 8 box, though. So instead, I opted for the $HOME/.profile script, it works fine on a Solaris 9 box.

i a beginner sun user, would u give me a complate step to create that....
thx