Does anyone have a good way to restrict access to systemctl and some of it's commands?
systemctl reboot or systemctl poweroff seem to take effect immediately, with no request for root permissions.
I switched to Ubuntu so that I could run my webserver on HHVM rather than WAMP. But I'm encountering basic problems that are slowing down my development time significantly. I feel this is probably a simple issue to address, but every post on the internet is "here's how you do this in terminal, and here's why it's the most dangerous thing in the world."
What I'm looking for is pretty simple: I want to load sublime (or gedit, or text editor of choice) and edit files in the /var/www directory WITHOUT having to change the owner, group, or permissions of the /var/www directory. I DON'T want to load my text editor through terminal - I just want to click on the side bar, choose a file, and it works.
I realize that as developers, yes, we can jump through hoops to resolve these problems on an individual basis through the terminal. But I just want to load up the desktop and enter the project without having to worry about loading several new commands when I need to change a virtual directory in /etc/nginx or something.
How can I have a one-click solution to the "privileges denied" issues when trying to locally edit system files / files that are protected for a reason? Bearing in mind I ONLY want to do this locally, thus not wanting to change their protective settings.
Edit: This question is 95% resolved. It would be preferable if Ubuntu Desktop version were slightly more accessible for development purposes for superusers, but the accepted answer by Jacob addresses the main issue and showcases some interesting functionality with Ubuntu.
I have two administrator user accounts, and I need one of them to turn the other into a standard account.
How do I do that?
I've recently switched from Ubuntu 10.04 LTS to 12.04 LTS, and one of the changes i have noticed is that when i try to run the command ifconfig (for example to view my own ip), i get the following output:
Command 'ifconfig' is available in '/sbin/ifconfig' The command could not be located because '/sbin' is not included in the PATH environment >variable. This is most likely caused by the lack of administrative privileges associated with your >user account. ifconfig: command not found
In order to run the command, i have to run sudo ifconfig. This was not the case in 10.04, so i wonder: is there a reason for this change? Is this the expected behavior for 12.04, or is something wrong with my settings? Hopefully someone else running Ubuntu 12.04 can try running the command and see if they get the same result as me.
Accidentally, I made a mistake with files in /bin/ folder, and now I learned that some of it need to have SUID bit. Can someone please do ls -l /bin/ and paste which files doesn't have -rwxr-xr-x flags?