[TriLUG] Limited Access User Account

[Dhruv Gami]

Hello Everyone,

I am trying to setup an account for a user, who is to be given limited
access. For example, this user should be able to run things like reboot,
useradd, ifconfig, tail, emacs (or vi) ... essentially a list of
programs that I specify, and only those programs.

Googling around for this got me to some posts on other mailing lists
that mentioned something to the effect of using bash with the -r
directive to get restricted shell which can execute only the programs in
its bin directory. With this approach, I was unable to figure out how to
set bash -r as the default shell for the user, and was confused whether
or not i can set superuser programs like ifconfig to run from this
user's account.

Is there any other way to do this ? I know theoretically i could define
a group and set it up in some way to get this done, but i dont know how
to get that done. Google didn't reveal much practical information, only
theoretical capabilities.

Any pointers ?

regards,
Gami