UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hello,

Another newbie here and here is my dilemma. I created an account for me on Solaris 8 and I added myself to the root group. But when I login using that account I am unable to do superuser tasks.. (add users, admintool, etc). What am I missing? Thanks in advance..

Andre

Do a ls -l admintool in the directory where it exists. If you see something like:

Code:

-rwxr--r--   1 root   root         723 Oct 31 05:55 admintool

Then you'll need to make sure the group can execute as well.

chmod g+x admintool

Man chmod for more info.

Livinfree,

Thanks, I will try that, but if i choose to go throught the command line, are the rights automatically assumed. I am a member of that group, so I do not understand why I would have to change any permissions. Can you explain the unix reasoning why? Thanks for your quick response.

-aj

I must disagree with this advice. Only a process whose effective uid is zero can do superuser stuff. This is very deeply embedded in the kernel and no amount of fiddling with inodes in a filesystem is going to confer superuser status on a process just because it is a member of a group called root. You would also need to set the suid bit on many files and ensure that they are owned by root to have a shot at this. Say good-bye to system security if you do.

Even if you could do this, you shouldn't want to. It's a good thing that your normal account can't do root stuff. The first time you accidently type "rm *" while cd'ed to /etc and find that you did no damage will compensate you for needing to type "su" and enter a password every now and then.

Take a look at this thread. You are going to greatly increase the chance that this happens to you.

Thanks for your advice, Coming from the Windows world. So basically, to do any administrative duties, I should su to 'root'. what about the sysadmin group would that allow me to do some things? Thks..

-AJ

Oops, I stand corrected. I wasn't thinking straight up there..