Giving access to server *almost* as root

Server Config
1

Hi,
I hope somebody can help me as my experience with Linux is very limited.

I have a LAMP (Fedora 12) webserver to which I would like to give access to an external consultant. He needs to have pretty much unlimited access, but I would not like to give him the root password so I was thinking of doing the following:

  1. Create a user account to which I would give pretty much all permissions root has
  2. Create a log file which logs all keystrokes of such user so I can check nothing funny is bing done
  3. Ensure that such user cannot become root or in any way tamper with this log

As my experience is limited I would like to ask if what I have suggested makes sense (and if so, how to do this, I have no clue) or if there are better ways.

Thanks,
Frodo

2

You would have to create a user from root, and give that user the privileges you want. Would you allow the user to have read? write? move? Capability. Since you are not using Windows, I can’t help you, but a quick search will allow you to set certain privileges to a user, created while logged in as root.

3

I think you need to add a user to the admin/sudo abilities. I don’t know anything about Fedora.

$ sudo visudo