shutdown by regular user

[Karl Auer]

On Thu, 2015-03-26 at 07:03 -0400, william drescher wrote:
> How can a non-privileged user initiate a shutdown.

Only do this if you trust your users to shutdown only when necessary.

There are lots of ways!

- have a cronjob that checks every minute for a specific file in /tmp
and shuts down if the file exists

- have a setuid script that shuts the system down

- have a "shutdown" group, put your users into it, add a sudoers rule to
let that group shut the system down

- put the system on a UPS, run a UPS client that will shut the system
down if the power fails, and tell your users to turn off the power to
the UPS in an emergency.

- and probably a few other ways as well.

Regards, K.

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Karl Auer (kauer at biplane.com.au)
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