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Issue 57

From Issue #57
January 1999

Jan 01, 1999  By Various
 in
Our experts answer your technical questions.
Shutting Down

I am using Red Hat 4.2. I would like to give a user who is not root the permission to shut down the system. The man page says, “write the name of the user in the file /etc/shutdown.allow”. Unfortunately, this has no effect, i.e., the user gets the message “must be root” after typing shutdown. —Thomas Okon, okon@math.tu-dresden.de

The only way I know of for any user to correctly shut down a Linux system is to be physically present at the keyboard and press ctrl-alt-del. This key sequence has the effect of running shutdown from init(8). This is the default behavior and all /etc/shutdown.allow does is to restrict ctrl-alt-del even more to specifically named users.

Updating Web Site

I am using Red Hat 5.0. How can I write a script that compares two directories recursively, one on the localhost, the other on an FTP site, then upload only the newer files to the FTP site? I wish to easily update my web site which is getting quite large and difficult to update manually. —Grim_Sweeper@softhome.net

The good news is the solution is already available. The bad news is that you will have to configure it to fit your needs. I'm talking about the mirror package available at ftp://src.doc.ic.ac.uk/packages/mirror/mirror.tar.gz. This is an excerpt from the man page:

Mirror was written for use by archive maintainers but can be used by anyone wanting to transfer a lot of files via ftp. Regardless of how it is called, mirror always performs the same basic steps. It connects to the remote site, internally builds a directory listing of the local target directory, builds one for the remote directory, compares them, creates any subdirectories required, transfers the appropriate files (setting their time-stamps to match those on the remote site), creates any symbolic links, removes any unnecessary objects and finally drops the connection.

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