Let’s face it, giving out your root password to your Linux server isn’t very smart or security minded. Still there are many of us who provide our root user and before we know it, we’re either looking at a compromise or a permissions issue or worse. Though it doesn’t need to be this way. No… We can create a new user and give them root access or we can edit the abilities of this user.
How does one do this you ask? Simple. In this instance, we’ll setup a new user to have root access, but this works out as we can add the user to the sudoers file, meaning we know who we are giving access to. Heck, you may want to do this for your main user and disable the root user for security reasons, but that’s your call.
Any how, on to the fun stuff!
1. First we need to login to the server, so don’t disable the root user yet, and create a new user. For this example, I’ll make a new user called madtech. So we SSH into the server and type the following;
“useradd madtech”
2. Next we need to add a password for the user, to do this we need to type the following;
“passwd madtech”
It will then ask for us to enter the password and then again to confirm the password.
3. Now that we created the user, we need to edit the sudoers file. Take note we don’t want to edit this with or standard text editors.. no, thats bad. We need to use visudo. Visudo should already be installed on the server. So what we need to do now is goto the following line;
“chmod 4111 /usr/bin/sudo”
Finally, we can choose what options are available for apache / php. This can be several screens long, so make sure you scroll up and down to view all the options. Once you have selected what you need, hit the next step.
