Re: Rebooting and halting the system in gnome

[Robert Wittams <robert wittams ic ac uk>]

Hassan Aurag wrote:
> 
>  For some weird reason, gdm allows you once logged out to shutdown
> reboot without any passwords.
> 

The rationale behind this option is I believe that if someone is at your
machine, and wants to turn it off or reboot, it is better to let them 
do it in a safe way rather than hitting the power switch. 

I think that the shutting down / rebooting should probably be seperated
into a system wide service accesible via corba when those are
working/possible. This would mean that you wouldn't need to have setuid
log out programs, they could just contact the service, and maybe in
large environments ( offices/ universities ) this could be accessed
remotely. Of course the security of this set up would have to be looked
at very closely, and initially it might be better to only allow local
transport and therefore utilise the unix filesystem access mechanisms
only.

Rob