Hi Brian,
Basically, the terms "root" "superuser" "administrator" are all identical, you'll also
quite often see the term "priveledged user" quite a bit. root seems to be the most
common, and since this is also usually the actual user account name this makes sense.
The priveledged granted to the root account by the system are nothing to do with the
account name. The operating system uses a unique number (the "User Identifier", or
uid) for each account to identify them, the name of the account is simply to make them
easy for humans to work with. The operating system gives special priveledges to the
account with uid = 0. There is nothing to stop you creating more than 1 account with a
different name and the same uid. It's generally a bad idea though.
To get the effect you want with respect to administering Apache/WU-FTP/whatever, you
should create a group for this and add all the users you want to be able to admin this
stuff to the group. Without looking at you system setup, this could be accomplished
by:
Command: Explanation:
--------------------------------- ---------------------------------
groupadd webadmin Create a groupfor the administrators
to have, you
can use any name you want to here.
vim /etc/group This is the group defenitions file, you can
see
how it's formatted: the last field on
each line is
a comma seperated list of users in
each group.
Simply add all the users you want to
the end of
the line starting with webadmin.
cd /apache/install/point Go to where you installed Apache to
chgrp -R webadmin * Make all of the files members of the webadmin
group
chmod -R g+wrx * Grant full permissions on those files,
to any user
in the same group as the files
(webadmin here)
Repeat the last 3 steps for each peice of software you want to be admin'ed in this
way.
IMPORTANT NOTE: This isn't secure, it's a quick and dirty fix. In particular, granting
full permissions like that is bad form, you should go through all of the files and
change group membership and permissions to only allow the users to do what it
required, but without more info about your system I can't do this. The above solution
will work.
Yours,
Ian.
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