Hi, I am an almost converted Windows guy (MCSE:S, MCSA:S, and all that) that has gone to what many of my colleagues refer to as "The Dark Side". I have been working with Linux for 2 or 3 years now and am quite confident in carrying out most tasks. I have a question that some may think should be a no brainer, but here goes anyway.

Q) What would be the simplest and most effective way to allow a non-root user to be able to carry out a root privileged task such as changing the IP address on a system. I have fiddled with things like setting yast2 (as I am using SUSE Linux) with a SUID bit set (mode 4755), and also, setting the USERCONTROL flag in the eth-cfg file to yes. Some settings get further, but still wont save the settings.

I don't want the hassle of setting up sudo, and I cannot use su as that defeats the object of not giving root access passwords out. I just want certain chosen commands/tasks to be able to be run by a particular non-root user account.

Any ideas people?

sorry, but sudo is the only way that I can think off.

yea same here.

Id put it up on the SuSe forum and any other linux forum as when i was using Mandrake the guys on there were spot on with helping me with problems

sorry ever only used sudo - can't help here im afraid :(

If you're specifically disallowing "r" commands, you will need to use sudo.

Oh well. Looks like it's sudo then

Many thanks for all your replies.

Yeah sudo and a restrictive sudoers file...

That or give all the users a UID of 0