Linux Security Cookbook

5.13. Starting/Stopping Daemons via sudo

Problem

You want specific non-superusers to start and stop system daemons.

Solution

Here we let four different users start, stop, and restart web servers. The script for doing so is /etc/init.d/httpd for Red Hat, or /etc/init.d/apache for SuSE. We’ll reference the Red Hat script in our solution.

               /etc/sudoers:
User_Alias  FOLKS=barbara, l33t, jimmy, miroslav
Cmnd_Alias  DAEMONS=/etc/init.d/httpd start,\
        /etc/init.d/httpd stop,\
        /etc/init.d/httpd restart
FOLKS  ALL = (ALL) DAEMONS

Discussion

Note our use of sudo aliases for the users and commands. Read the sudoers(5) manpage to learn all kinds of fun capabilities like this.

See Also

sudo(8), sudoers(5).