Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!oucsace!pmech From: pmech@oucsace.cs.OHIOU.EDU (Paul J. Mech) Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions Subject: Re: halt not by root Summary: Another way Keywords: halt ! not root Message-ID: <287@oucsace.cs.OHIOU.EDU> Date: 24 Sep 88 23:55:49 GMT References: <1128@usfvax2.EDU> Organization: Ohio University CS Dept., Athens Lines: 20 In article <1128@usfvax2.EDU>, ssi@usfvax2.EDU (Ssi) writes: > I run a Sun file server with clients. My question is > how can I give halt(8) permission to users other than > root. We shut the system down at night and root is > at home. > I ran into this problem with a client of mine. I wrote a short program to provide a warning and shut down the system, and added the following line to /etc/passwd shutdown::0:0:shutdown system:/etc:/etc:/etc/dienow (The uid and gid for root were both zero on that system. /etc/dienow was the shutdown program.) I then assigned it a password and passed it out to the people who were to shut down the system at night. Trying to 'su' to shutdown produced an error, 'no shell'. And this system worked well for two months until we had eliminated the need for an evening shutdown. pjm