Allowing regular user to restart network process??

carlos123 · 12-03-2003, 03:24 AM

For some reason whenever me or other users log out and then back in to our KDE desktops on my computer the Internet goes down and must be restarted manually.

Now regular users can't normally do that. Since it's my computer I just su to root and do it for myself when I am logged in as my regular user (who has su'ing privaleges).

I would like to let other users (like my wife and daugher) just run a script that restarts the network with the line "/etc/init.d/net.eth0 restart" running under Gentoo linux.

But unless a user su'es to root such a script won't work. Since only a su'ed root user can normally restart processes. I don't want to make my wife and my daughter members of the wheel group which can su to root since they don't know what they are doing under Linux and might mess something up if made a member of that group.

Is there a way to give regular users the ability to restart just this ONE process? Namely the network? Without su'ing to root? All that they care or need to do so?

Any general suggestions as to how I might be able to do this would be greatly appreciated. I've never been able to figure out why the network goes down between logins so I figure a little script to restart it is the best and easiest way to let my wife and daugher restart the network.

Thanks.

Carlos

binkybuckle · 12-03-2003, 03:40 AM

you could have the linux computer just dial everytime on bootup by adding a bootup script. Or maybe have a script written that su's in and out of root just to run that command (I have never done this option before though).

Y0jiMb0 · 12-03-2003, 03:44 AM

Hi!
I'm going to explain what happens in my system; I hope it helps you (it could be not exactly the same in your case)
When my computer begins the "default runlevel" (which is "4", for X11) it calls to "/etc/rc.d/rc.M"; there are a couple of lines telling:

Code:

# Initialize the networking hardware.  If your network driver is a module
# and you haven't loaded it manually, this will be deferred until after
# the hotplug system loads the module below.
if [ -x /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1 ]; then
  . /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1
fi

so, if the file "/etc/rc.d/rc.inet1" exists and is executable, it runs. And this is the script which starts and stops the network.

Regards