Defining user authorization controls

Defining user authorization on a computer mainly deals with deciding the activities that a user may or may not be allowed to do. This could include activities such as executing a program or reading a file.

Since the root account has all privileges, authorization controls mainly deal with allowing or disallowing root access to user accounts.

Getting started...

To see how user authorization works, we need a user account to try the commands on. Hence, we create a couple of user accounts, user1 and user2, to try the commands.

How to do it...

In this section, we will go through various controls which can be applied on user accounts.

1. Suppose we have two user accounts, user1 and user2. We log in from user2 and then try to run a command, ps, as user1. In a normal scenario, we get the result as shown:

   

2. Now edit the file /etc/sudoers and add the line as given below:

   User2 ALL = (user1) /bin/ps
   

3. After saving the changes in /etc/sudoers, again try to run the command ps from...