I've decided that it's about time I look for a solution to a problem that's been bugging me. On certain occasions, I find it necessary to have one of my roommates do something to the network at home when I'm not there. As such, they generally will need root access to do it. While I certainly trust them, I'm very security conscious and wouldn't feel comfortable giving them my root password. So I had the idea of setting up a one-time use root account. You can log in once, but as soon as you do the user gets locked out. (passwd -l in .bashrc)
Unfortunately, since I use the "real" root account very frequently this would be a great hassle. So I'd like to set up a pseudo-root account for this purpose. It's easy enough to do an adduser --gid 0, but that would still leave quite a few things which the user couldn't do. (At least unless I did a chmod -R g+rwx *, which I'd like to avoid.)
So any ideas on how to go about it? Is it possible to have two different users with the same UID? i.e. adduser --uid 0 --gid 0 temproot
If not, any other possibilities?
What about sudo? You can set it up to grant very limited permissions (i.e., one or two commands only) to a specific user.
-Roberto
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