[Quick Tips] : How to give permission to user to run some commands in Linux

How to give permission to user to run some commands in Linux
In Linux you can easily give permissions to user on a command basis, according to which that user will be allowed to run only those commands as super user and apart from those he/she would act as a normal user with normal privilege.

There can be cases when you want your user to be allowed to restart some particular service or run some specific commands with super user privilege so in that case you just need to make an entry for that user in sudoers file.

Let me show you how to do so

The file responsible to providing such permissions to users is /etc/sudoers

You can either open the file using vi to edit or there is an alternate and BETTER option to edit the sudoer file i.e using visudo command

One question should come to your mind

Why should I use visudo command instead of directly editing the file with vi or any other editor?

Well the answer is in case you are editing the sudoers file using vi editor and you use any wrong syntax and save and exit the file then it might even become hard for the root user to log back in and edit the file again. As vi editor would not check for any syntax error inside the file.
That is the reason you should always prefer to use visudo because even in case you make any syntax error then visudo will prompt you before making and changes and exiting.
# visudo
Let us understand the syntax before starting the exercise

This is the syntax which you will have to follow in order to give any user any sort of command related permission
%group        host=(Service Account)       Commands
%group : Permission will be applicable to all the users in this group
host : From all these hosts users can run the mentioned commands
Service Account : The commands would be run with the privilege of mentioned Service Account
Commands : List of commands

Suppose you want to give your user permission to run network and apache server restart permission

# visudo
%test  192.168.0.100=(root)  /etc/init.d/network, /etc/init.d/httpd

So, in the above line we are telling our Linux machine, Allow all the users of test group from192.168.0.61 to run network and apache server related commands using root privilege

Let use try to run these commands as test user

# su - test
$ sudo /etc/init.d/network restart
[sudo] password for test:
Shutting down interface eth0:  Device state: 3 (disconnected)
                                                           [  OK  ]
Shutting down loopback interface:                          [  OK  ]
Bringing up loopback interface:                            [  OK  ]
Bringing up interface eth0:  Active connection state: activated
Active connection path: /org/freedesktop/NetworkManager/ActiveConnection/3
                                                           [  OK  ]

Well it worked as expected

But what would happen in case test user tries to run any command for which he is not authenticated
$ sudo /etc/init.d/vsftpd restart
[sudo] password for test:
test is not allowed to run sudo on localhost.  This incident will be reported.
Oops the incident has been reported, but where will you check these reports?
# tail /var/log/secure
Sep 27 13:04:26 test sudo:     test : TTY=pts/1 ; PWD=/home/test ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/etc/init.d/network restart
Sep 27 13:09:23 test sudo:     test : user NOT authorized on host ; TTY=pts/1 ; PWD=/home/test ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/etc/init.d/vsftpd restart