su command question

[Robert Dailey]

On Sat, Jul 5, 2008 at 2:13 AM, Alan Milnes <deep64blue at itguru.org.uk> wrote:
> Smoot Carl-Mitchell wrote:
>> On Sat, 2008-07-05 at 00:40 +0100, Alan Milnes wrote:
>>> Smoot Carl-Mitchell wrote:
>>>> This is incorrect.  The script will run with the privileges of a user in
>>>> the "root" group, instead of the user ventrilo. I am not sure what
>>>> happens with the above, since by default there are no users in the
>>>> "root" group.  You could do this, however:
>>> Well I carefully tested it on my system and it works as expected - the
>>> script runs as root, doesn't require a password and successfully carries
>>> out the command.
>>
>> Exactly my point.  The original poster wanted the script to run as the
>> user "ventrilo" and *not* as the user "root".
>
> No he didn't - read the post again.  His requirement was to run it
> without a password prompt - he was using his user name as he knew it
> needed super user privileges.

Thanks for the ongoing discussion about this guys. I probably wasn't
very clear on my requirements before, and for that I do apologize. It
seems as if I need to clarify a few things since some debates have
started.

First of all, I'm pretty new to linux (Only a few weeks now), so that
may be part of the reason why I'm insufficiently explaining myself.
For that, I do apologize. I'll do my best to emphasize on what I'm
trying to do.

Basically, I'm trying to run a Ventrilo server, but the documentation
for Ventrilo suggests that you run the server as a user named
"ventrilo". That way, I can use chmod and chown to give the server
access rights to the files that the Ventrilo server will be
needing/accessing. The exact line of script I posted in my original
post was the suggested script to be run. However, I was surprised to
find (mainly due to my lack of experience) that I had to enter a
password prompt each time I ran my script to start the server.

I plan to make this script "hands-free", because later on I'm going to
be adding this to my /etc/rc.d/rc.local so that the server starts by
itself every time I reboot the server. "hands-free" here means
basically that the script does not require any user interaction, such
as requesting passwords.

The reason why I'm posting here is because the Ventrilo documentation
failed to cover password prompting issues and how to remove the
prompts.

I hope that I've added a few more details that I missed before. Again,
I apologize if I've confused anyone. I was actually expecting this to
be a simple problem to solve, however now that I've seen how many
options I have available, I'm not really sure what is the right path
to take. I appreciate everyone's help so far!