How to tweak Gnome user elevation in RHEL/CentOS

What you want to do for consolehelper is put UGROUPS=wheel in the console.apps files. (You don't need to change what's there already, and usually shouldn't.) And then add the corresponding users to the wheel group. Then, members in that group will be prompted to auth-as-self, while other users will still auth-as-root. (A while ago, I needed this same functionality, so I wrote it and got the patch upstreamed. Open source is awesome.)

This is documented in man userhelper.

On newer distributions — current Fedora and RHEL6 — consolehelper is being phased out in favor of PolicyKit (a.k.a. polkit). This has a different configuration scheme, but can also do the same thing. See man pklocalauthority for details on that, but the summary is: put files in /etc/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d with contents like:

[Wheel-Group Permissions]
Identity=unix-group:wheel
Action=org.something.seedocs.*;more.actions.*;whatever.you.want.*
ResultAny=auth_self

And, finally, you can uncomment the %wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL line in /etc/sudoers. (This may become the default in Fedora 15.)