Creating a "semi" root user? Is it possible? Post: 302170350

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Operating Systems HP-UX Creating a "semi" root user? Is it possible? Post 302170350 by Setan on Monday 25th of February 2008 10:41:56 AM

02-25-2008

Registered User

Creating a "semi" root user? Is it possible?

Hello All,

I work as a system admin at a company of about 600 users on a HP-UX server. We have an IT department of about 15. My problem is that we give out the root password to the majority of them, they are phone support techs, as they need to get in to kill processes and setup users and printers on a daily basis.

Recently someone changed the root password and disabled the account and we couldn't find out who. After about 3 hours we found out our VAR was prompted to change it when they logged in but they were a little slow in letting us know.

This still ticked me off enough to want to lock down root as much as possible and to take away the privilege from as many people as I can starting with our tech support guys.

So, I was wondering if it's possible to create a new user (or possibly add to their current user account) that would have ONLY the following abilities:

- Kill user processes
- Setup new users
- possibly start a few random scripts

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Mike

Setan

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LEARN ABOUT CENTOS

sulogin

SULOGIN(8)						       System Administration							SULOGIN(8)

NAME

       sulogin - Single-user login

SYNOPSIS

       sulogin [options] [tty]

DESCRIPTION

       sulogin is invoked by init when the system goes into single user mode.

       The user is prompted:

	    Give root password for system maintenance
	    (or type Control-D for normal startup):

       sulogin	will  be  connected  to  the  current terminal, or to the optional tty device that can be specified on the command line (typically
       /dev/console).

       After the user exits the single-user shell or presses control-D at the prompt, the system will continue to boot.

OPTIONS

       -e, --force
	      If the default method of obtaining the root password via getpwnam(3)  from  the  system  fails,  manually  examine  /etc/passwd  and
	      /etc/shadow to get the password.	If they are damaged or nonexistent, sulogin will start a root shell without asking for a password.

	      Only use the -e option if you are sure the console is physically protected against unauthorized access.

       -p, --login-shell
	      Specifying this option causes sulogin to start the shell process as a login shell.

       -t, --timeout seconds
	      Specify the maximum amount of time to wait for user input.  By default, sulogin will wait forever.

       -h, --help
	      Print a help message.

       -V, --version
	      Output version.

ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES

       sulogin looks for the environment variable SUSHELL or sushell to determine what shell to start.	If the environment variable is not set, it
       will try to execute root's shell from /etc/passwd.  If that fails it will fall back to /bin/sh.

AUTHOR

       sulogin was written by Miquel van Smoorenburg for sysvinit and later ported to util-linux by Dave Reisner and Karel Zak.

AVAILABILITY

       The sulogin command is part of the util-linux package and is available  from  Linux  Kernel  Archive  <ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils
       /util-linux/>.

util-linux							     Jul 2012								SULOGIN(8)