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 ready

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

How to do it...

In this section, we will go through various controls that 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 this result:

 

2. Now, edit the /etc/sudoers file and add this line:

User2 ALL = (user1) /bin/ps

3. After saving the changes in /etc/sudoers, again try to run the ps command from user2 as user1:

4. Now, if we want to run...