Jukka Simila wrote,

On a computer at work that people need to be able to bring up and down, I did the following old trick,

1) I created a user called 'shutdown' 2) Made the user a member of group 'operator' (5). 3) Gave shutdown a startup shell something like, /usr/local/libexec/conshtdwn 4) Put something like the following in that file,

#!/bin/sh

if [ -z $REMOTEHOST ] && [ "x$HOST" = "x`hostname`" ]; then

/sbin/shutdown -h now

else

echo "The computer may only be shutdown at the terminal." echo "" echo "This account is not available for login." exit 1

fi

# NOT REACHED exit 2

5) Give the user, shutdown, a null password.

This way, anyone, even someone without an account, can shutdown the computer gracefully at the terminal. This is much better than the other alternative of having them push reset or cycle the power on the running OS.

I must admit I can't remember for sure how I did the check to make sure the login is not from a remote machine (for obvious reasons an anonymous shutdown from remote locations is a Bad Thing). The way I have done it here is for illustrative purposes, I do not think it is sure-fire or secure.

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