Книга: Fedora™ Unleashed, 2008 edition

Granting Root Privileges on Occasion — The sudo Command

Granting Root Privileges on Occasion — The sudo Command

It is often necessary to delegate some of the authority that root wields on a system. For a large system, this makes sense because no single individual will always be available to perform super-user functions. The problem is that UNIX permissions come with an all-or- nothing authority. Enter sudo, an application that permits the assignment of one, several, or all of the root-only system commands.

After it is configured, using sudo is simple. An authorized user merely precedes the command that requires super-user authority with the sudo command, as follows:

$ sudo command

After getting the user's password, sudo checks the /etc/sudoers file to see whether that user is authorized to execute that particular command; if so, sudo generates a "ticket" for a specific length of time that authorizes the use of that command. The user is then prompted for his password (to preserve accountability and provide some measure of security), and then the command is run as if root had issued it. During the life of the ticket, the command can be used again without a password prompt. If an unauthorized user attempts to execute a sudo command, a record of the unauthorized attempt is kept in the system log and a mail message is sent to the super user.

Three man pages are associated with sudo: sudo, sudoers, and visudo. The first covers the command itself, the second the format of the /etc/sudoers file, and the third the use of the special editor for /etc/sudoers. You should use the special editing command because it checks the file for parse errors and locks the file to prevent others from editing it at the same time. The visudo command uses the vi editor, so you might need a quick review of the vi editing commands found in Chapter 4 in the section "Working with vi." You begin the editing by executing the visudo command with this:

# visudo

The default /etc/sudoers file looks like this:

# sudoers file.
#
#
# This file MUST be edited with the 'visudo' command as root.
#
# See the sudoers man page for the details on how to write a sudoers file.
#
# Host alias specification
# User alias specification
# Cmnd alias specification
# Defaults specification
# User privilege specification
root ALL=(ALL) ALL
# Uncomment to allow people in group wheel to run all commands
# %wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL
# Same thing without a password
# %wheel ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL
# Samples
# %users ALL=/sbin/mount /cdrom,/sbin/umount /cdrom
# %users localhost=/sbin/shutdown -h now

The basic format of a sudoers line in the file is as follows:

user host_computer=command

The user can be an individual user or a group (prepended by a % to identify the name as a group). The host_computer is normally ALL for all hosts on the network and localhost for the local machine, but the host computer can be referenced as a subnet of any specific host. The command in the sudoers line can be ALL, a list of specific commands, or a restriction on specific commands (formed by prepending a ! to the command). A number of options are available for use with the sudoers line, and aliases can be used to simplify the assignment of privileges. Again, the sudoers man page gives the details, but here are a few examples:

If you uncomment the line, as follows

# %wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL

any user you add to the wheel group can execute any command after entering their specific password.

Suppose that you want to give user vanessa permission across the network to be able to add users with the graphical interface. You would add the following line:

vanessa ALL=/system-config-users

Or perhaps you would grant permission only on her local computer:

vanessa 192.168.1.87=/usr/bin/system-config-users

If you want to give the editor group systemwide permission with no password required to delete files, you use this:

%editors ALL=NOPASSWD: /bin/rm

If you want to give every user permission with no password required to mount the CD drive on the localhost, use the following:

ALL localhost=NOPASSWD:/sbin/mount /dev/scd0 /mnt/cdrom /sbin/umount /mnt/cdrom

It is also possible to use wildcards in the construction of the sudoers file. Aliases can be used, as well, to make it easier to define users and groups. Although the man page for sudoers contains some examples, http://www.komar.org/pres/sudo/toc.html provides illustrative notes and comments of sudo use at a large aerospace company. The sudo home page at http://www.sudo.ws/ is also a useful resource for additional explanations and examples.

The following command presents users with a list of the commands they are entitled to use:

$ sudo -l

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