User with Root privilege

[meekrob]

Hi all ,

i need to create a user with Root privileges , how can i do it ? did i have to give him the same id as root ,

Thank's

[Sundar_7]

Any user with UID 0 becomes root. But it is strongly recommended not to create users with UID 0 (except for root ofcourse).

You can consider using restricted SAM feature or install SUDO that will let you selectively enable superuser previlege to the users and also log their activities.

[Sundar_7]

and one more option is to use SETUID to root for the binaries/scripts. This is also a big no-no for security reasons, but if you absolutely must.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Any user with UID 0 is a super-user but it is state-of-the-art dumb to have more than 1 login with UID 0. It is a huge security risk and the system will be unable to distinguish tasks done by root and "root2" because the system identifies users by the UID.

It is much better to install sudo on your system and allow specific users to perform specific tasks which require root access.

[meekrob]

How can i have SUDO , is it for Free ?

[Tom Henning]

Sudo is freely available and can be downloaded as part of the internet express package.
http://h20293.www2.hp.com/portal/swdepot/searchProducts.do

[Alfredo Garcia Martino]

It's part of HP-UX Internet Express and it's for free.

For HP-UX 11v1:
https://h20293.www2.hp.com/portal/swdepot/try.do?productNumber=HPUXIEXP1111

For HP-UX 11v2:
https://h20293.www2.hp.com/portal/swdepot/try.do?productNumber=HPUXIEXP1123

[Tim Nelson]

As you can see you should probably let us know why you are wanting to do this and we can help find you alternate options. i.e. restricted sam, sudo , suid, etc..

You might as well just give whomever the password for the root user, as creating another user with the uid of zero is effectively no different.

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi:

Duplicating the uid of zero (0) is designed to help you or your successor totally wipe out your system.

Imagine that there is a user called "tech" that has a uid=0. You have noted that it hasn't been used in years and you are a new administrator cleaning up the server that you have inherited.

You do:

# find / -user tech -exec rm -rf {} \+

You have just removed everything owned by 'root' and are left with an unusable system as it grinds to a halt.

Names are for the benefit of humans. What counts is the 'uid' or numeric counterpart.

Regards!

...JRF...

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

You will undoubtedly be told by purists like me that there should not be more than one root user with user id zero.

That coming from a shop where each admin has his own root user so that we can know which root user did what to what system.

If the user does not require full root privs, consider sudo as an alternative.

SEP