Shell Programming and Scripting

What i am trying to solve is this:
I have been reuested by manager to create 6 users on unix server machine. 3 users to have the same privilage as the root user(they can add/remove users, reboot or restart the server,etc...) while the rest to be normal users, (they can do daily work such as monitoring the system, cp, mv...etc)......one i was thinking to do it is to define the three new users in the root group and the rest to be in others group.....do u think this would solve the request or there is somethig else which i dont know??

It has nothing to do with the groups. You can either give them a UID of 0 as described above ( NOT RECOMMENDED ) , or give them the root password and let them use 'su'. Also, 'sudo' is another alternative.

In fact, if you are going to create accounts with UID 0 , you might as well just give out the root password to those users. It is never a good idea to login and do any non-administrative tasks as root. The 'su' command should suffice for adding users, etc. The exception is if these userid's are not going to be used for interactive login ( for example , /sbin/nologin as the shell ).

I would have to agree with nathan on this one; multiple accounts with a 0 UID is not a good idea. It seems you have three administrative users and an assortment of "regular users".

On my Solaris servers, there are three system admins. Each one has a regular account with primary group of 14 (sysadmin) and each one knows the root password. Direct root access from any terminal other than the console has been disabled via /etc/default/login.

After these configurations, root access will require a user id and password of an account belonging to the sysadmin group as well as the root password.

Historically, the wheel account has been used to limit su(1M) access but the sysadmin account is not used by any other Solaris package. It also makes sense.


# cd /usr/bin
# ls -la su
-r-sr-xr-x 1 root sys 21192 Jun 15 14:42 su
# /usr/bin/chgrp sysadmin su
# /usr/bin/chmod 04750 su
# ls -la su
-rwsr-x--- 1 root sysadmin 21192 Jun 15 14:42 su
# cd /sbin
# ls -la su.static
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root sys 524372 Jun 15 14:42 su.static
# /usr/bin/chgrp sysadmin su.static
# /usr/bin/chmod 04750 su.static
# ls -la su.static
-rwsr-x--- 1 root sysadmin 524372 Jun 15 14:42 su.static