Below are the findings of an idiot, if they help you great, if not 
that's what you get for listening to an idiot.


Just for sh%ts and giggles I tried this on my Mandrake 8.1 box, it works 
there too.  Looks like halt (/usr/bin/halt) is acutally a link to 
something called consolehelper that has 755 perms.  Consolehelper looks 
like a jack of all trades in that lots of stuff points to it.

halt
userdrake
shutdown
rpminst
rpmdrake
poweroff
Mandrakeupdate
logview

Looks like consolehelper is there to let regular users run all kinds of 
stuff as root, stuff like rpminst and userdrake will prompt you for a 
root password, other stuff like halt will not.  Just a way to keep you 
from having to log in as root I guess.  If it really bugs you I suppose 
you could set the perms on consolehelper to 700 (root owns it) but I 
have no idea what other stuff it may break.


Jimmy Jam wrote:

> Hi All,
> 
> My RdHat 7.2 allows me to halt the system (using the halt command) as an ordinary (non root) user.  Does anyone know why.  I would think this is vry dangerous.
> 
> 



-- 


It is much easier to be critical than correct.
- Benjamin Disraeli