You can create an administrative user and provide them with access to the su or switch user command that enables them to change the ownership of a login session in order to become root or any other user.
Managing a server as the root user is probably not the best way to work as you are leaving yourself open to a whole host of issues that can give rise to a multitude of errors.
Using of the root user account should be left until it is required, so here we configure a day-to-day administrative user who can switch to using root with the su command.
To start with, log in as root and create your new user, in this case anton
# useradd anton
# passwd anton
Use alphanumeric between 6 - 16 characters long.
Now add the user to the wheel group
# usermod -a -G wheel anton
Now we activate the wheel module in PAM
The PAM or the Pluggable Authentication Module provides a global method of authenticating users across the system as a whole without any individual program being required to know which authentication system will be use.
# vi /etc/pam.d/su
Vi an Vim commands
Scroll down and uncomment the following line
auth required pam_wheel.so use_uid
Save and exit the file.
Now you have activated the su command for the user and it can become root user by issuing the su command
$ su anton
To end the session use the exit command
$ exit
And the whoami command to determine which user is active
With the Centos live cd I am currently using to type this
$ whoami
centoslive
See also adding a user to a Centos 6 Fluxbox Desktop
Labels: Centos 6, create administrative user using root with su, RHEL