How should I grant a user the privilege to restart the nagios services?

Question

What is the best way to grant user an access so they can restart the nagios services?

I have added in visudo

USER ALL = NOPASSWD: /usr/sbin/service ServiceName *

But that did not work, I am using Red hat 6,

User name is ahmed
Service name : nagios

Welcome to Unix & Linux. Sorry for the edited title but there are multiple ways of doing things and I'll be giving you one. Whichever is "the best" is opinion-based, which is off-topic on this site. — Fabby, Sep 19 '18 at 16:20
Thanks Fabby, I am sorry if this is off topic, I am kinda new here so I was trying to get help from the Galaxy people. — John, Sep 19 '18 at 16:29
and did you type in the literal line `USER ALL`..., or did you use `ahmed ALL`...? — Jeff Schaller, Sep 19 '18 at 16:29
I never messed with visudo file, Thanks Jeff I was using USER ALL not Ahmed ALL @JeffSchaller — John, Sep 19 '18 at 16:30

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited Jun 11 '20 at 14:16

According to the Nagios Documentation, Nagios is still init-based, so to allow any user to start and stop the Nagios service, we're going to:

create an operator Command alias
create an operator group
allow anyone in the operator group to start/stop the Nagios Service:
As an example, add the user "ahmed" to the operator group (as per your question)

first change the sudoers file:

sudo visudo

in the section # Cmnd alias specification add:

Cmnd_Alias      CMD_OPERATOR=/etc/rc.d/init.d/nagios

in the ### User privilege specification section ### add:

# Allow the group "operator" to use certain applications
%operator       ALL=CMD_OPERATOR

Now create the group operator:

sudo groupadd operator

and add ahmed to the operator group:

sudo usermod --append --groups operator ahmed

That's it! Now ahmed can perform all these commands:

sudo /etc/rc.d/init.d/nagios start
sudo /etc/rc.d/init.d/nagios reload
sudo /etc/rc.d/init.d/nagios stop

by providing his own password.

Well, now you have an operator group, you can:

1 Answers1