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Accepted
Zenet
Asked: 2011-02-28 11:20:50 +0800 CST

What to change in /etc/sudoers to allow restarting service?

  • 772

I want an unprivileged user to be able to restart tomcat on my server. So I edited /etc/sudoers as follows 

username  ALL=/etc/init.d/tomcat6

However, when the user runs /etc/init.d/tomcat6 restart he gets this error:

Starting tomcat server...
 touch: cannot touch `/var/tomcat6/logs/catalina.out': Permission denied
/var/tomcat6/bin/catalina.sh: line 314: /var/tomcat6/logs/catalina.out: Permission denied

How do I allow this user to run tomcat without giving him write permission on the log file /var/tomcat6/logs/catalina.out ? 

[root@jsp1 ~]# ll /var/tomcat6/logs/catalina.out
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 272669097 Feb 27 21:50 /var/tomcat6/logs/catalina.out
tomcat sudo

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Make sure to actually run the command with sudo when you try it.

    • 6

  2. I wanted to use the service command for this, so I came up with this:

    %tomcat7 ALL=NOPASSWD:/usr/sbin/service tomcat7*

    This allows everyone in tomcat7-group to start/stop/restart the tomcat service with sudo service tomcat7 <command> without typing their password.

    • 0