I have a PC at work running Fedora 14. For some reason, the IT guys do not give out the password for the root user, but instead, if needed they create a specific suXXX user with root permissions.
The entry in /etc/passwd looks like this:
su9705:XXXXPASSWORDXXX:0:0:Root My Name:/root:/bin/bash
As you can see it shares the same UID and GID as root, so anytime I need to do something with special permissions I can just type 'su su9705'
.
The problem is when I'm in the graphical environment, and some software (usually software installers, update managers) asks for the root password to perform certain operations. In that case I cannot use my su9705 password.
In the past I solved the problem by running su and changing the root password to something else, but I believe if IT finds this out they are going to kill me slowly.
I also added a line in /etc/sudoers to give my normal user user full permissions:
myNormalUser ALL=(ALL) ALL
However I'm still asked for authentication.
Are there any clean solutions to this? I would just like to be able to authenticate using my su9705 password instead of root in Gnome. Any ideas?
myNormalUser
's password.unix-group:admin
IIRC). Otherwise, Polkit asks for the password ofroot
.