Re: Shutdown or Reboot

[Ian Collier <Ian Collier comlab ox ac uk>]

On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 08:46:21AM +0100, Christoph Pleger wrote:
> Yes, that's how I found out that /sbin/shutdown is called with root
> privileges. Additionally, I saw that /sbin/shutdown is called by a
> script that belongs to consolekit.

This may be dependent on what distribution you are running, but at
least in recent Fedoras this is controlled by PolicyKit / polkit.

In Fedora 11, the command polkit-gnome-authorization could be used
to configure (via GUI) permissions for various actions.  Rebooting
and shutting down are among those actions.

In Fedora 12 this seems to have been done away with in favour of
editable text files in subdirectories of /var/lib/polkit-1/.  The
manual page for pklocalauthority(8) describes this, after a fashion,
but you might have to do a research project before you find out what
to actually write in the files.  Looking at the contents of
/usr/share/polkit-1/actions gives some information on the names
of various actions and what they are for.

imc