Skip to main content

Sudoers: when multiple entries match

I had a minor interpretation issue with a paragraph in the Sudoers Manual. So I wrote to the sudo mailinglist and asked a clarification... Here is their answer, which made perfect sense! Thanks!


Let's say you have a user, bob, who is a member of a group and sudo has a configuration like:
User_Alias ADMINS=bob,mike,tom
ADMINS ALL = (ALL) PASSWD: /bin/ps, /bin/ls, /usr/sbin/shutdown -y -g0 -i0
bob ALL = (ALL) PASSWD: /usr/sbin/shutdown


This says that bob has multiple entries (in the group and an explicit entry) but the rules say that his last match contradicts the ADMINS. It will give his last match... i.e., he can use shutdown with any argument... if you reverse these entries:
bob ALL = (ALL) PASSWD: /usr/sbin/shutdown
ADMINS ALL = (ALL) PASSWD: /bin/ps, /bin/ls, /usr/sbin/shutdown -y -g0 -i0

then you have effectively restricted bob to the same command as the other admins. and therefore not given him any special treatment...

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Preventing PuTTY timeouts

Just found a great tip to prevent timeouts of PuTTY sessions. I'm fine with timeouts by the host, but in our case the firewall kills sessions after 30 minutes of inactivity... When using PuTTY to ssh to your Linux/Unix servers, be sure to use the feature to send NULL packets to prevent a timeout. I've set it to once every 900 seconds, i.e. 15 minutes... See screenshot on the right.

Removing VGs or LVs from LVM

While are many excellent tutorials about creating and using LVM on Linux, not may show you how you can remove disks from LVM Volume Groups (VG) and reclaim storage or how to remove a Logical Volume (LV) from your LVM set-up. Here is what I did: Use -t to TEST ANY LVM action first! We are going to release 1 TB from LVM. The Volume group was extended with 1 TB storage to serve as a cheap NFS/CIFS file server when setting up our data center. It is now deprecated and replaced by a NAS so it's no longer needed. 1) check LVM; note the four 256 GB LUNs [root@server ~]# pvscan -v Wiping cache of LVM-capable devices Wiping internal VG cache Walking through all physical volumes PV /dev/sdb1 VG vgdata lvm2 [50.00 GB / 0 free] PV /dev/sdc1 VG vgdata lvm2 [256.00 GB / 0 free] PV /dev/sdd1 VG vgdata lvm2 [256.00 GB / 0 free] PV /dev/sde1 VG vgdata lvm2 [256.00 GB / 0 free] PV /dev/sdf1 VG vgdata lvm2 [256.00 GB / 0 free] PV /dev/sdg ...

Dell Linux - OMSA Hardware Monitoring

Just getting started using Dell's OpenManage Server Administrator (OMSA) on our Oracle Linux platform. There are some confusing instructions going around so it's not immediately clear what to do, hence my blogging here. :) There is a site on Dell - Hardware Monitoring , as well as a wiki with instruction on how to setup their OMSA tooling using yum or up2date. [update]My first update for their instructions: be sure your server has Internet access, as most servers will use a proxy or so. use export http_proxy=http://yourproxy.example.com:port to configure it just for the session, and setup up2date to use an HTTP proxy by editing the settings in /etc/sysconfig/rhn/up2date .