Thanks for explaining everything Gordon. :-) I followed a suggestion on the previous post and found a symlink from reboot in /usr/bin to consolehelper. And the manpage for consolehelper says it has something to do with PAM (which is a complicated thing of course.) But anyway, through this exercise, I stumbled upon another command called poweroff, which is the "legalised" command for non-root users to shutdown the system. So everything works great with that. Looks like the old shutdown command should be unlearned. :-)
Best, David > Red Hat has a somewhat complex setup involving PAM to allow users at the > console to do things that require root permission. > 'halt' and 'reboot' are symlinks to the 'consolehelper' which is not > SUID, but it invokes 'userhelper' which is. The man page for userhelper > does not seem to reflect its use in this role. All the same, the > userhelper commands use PAM, so you'll notice files like 'halt' and > 'reboot' in /etc/pam.d/ that control who is allowed to execute the > commands through userhelper. _______________________________________________ Redhat-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list