How to give administrative previledges

[Les Mikesell]

On Wed, 2005-04-06 at 19:24, Chethiya K Ranaweera wrote:

> 
> > Realistically, someone who had to ask that question in the first place
> > is not going to be able to configure sudo to the extent needed to
> > allow a useful set of operations but prevent unauthorized operations.
> > That's probably not even possible - for example you might want an
> > operator to be able to change all passwords except for root.
> > So, you might as well admit that you have to trust the person doing
> > the administration.  If you don't, I'd consider webmin as a better
> > starting place than sudo.
> > 
 
> So if this is the case, I would like to pose a question from my
> original assumption. What is the purpose of having a GID for root?

Root's GID works like any other, only UID=0 is special.

> From the above discussion, what I understand is that, even if you
> modify /etc/sudoers (say, give a user admin access by adding (ALL) ALL
> ), the system is not going to give *ALL* admin access to that user.

Yes it does: the user can then do:
sudo su -
and become root with only his own password. 

> So
> in that case, I truely do not understand of having a UID for root.

Setting uid=0 is the only special case.  You can do that for other
login names but it doesn't make much sense because all logins with
uid=0 have equivalent permissions.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   les at futuresource.com