Monday, August 23, 2010

consolehelper: Runs Programs as root

The consolehelper utility can make it easier for someone who is logged in on the system console but not logged in as root to run system programs that normally can be run only by root. PAM, which authenticates users, can be set to trust all console users, to require user passwords (not the root password), or to require the root password before granting trust. The concept underlying consolehelper is that you may want to consider as trustworthy anyone who has access to the console. For example, Alex can log in on the console as himself and run halt without knowing the root password.

Source of Information : Prentice Hall A Practical Guide to Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5th Edition

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