— 4 min read

Contents

Ah sudo, one of my favourites, funnily enough I’ve noticed a lot of Linux users use sudo (mainly because Ubuntu installs and configures your first user by default,) but very few seem to know that much about it. This can include not even knowing how to add a user to sudoers.

This article will give you some useful information on what sudo actually is, how to configure it and how to restrict it.

What is sudo?

So, quickly running man sudo gives us some information what sudo actually is and does.

sudo allows a permitted user to execute a command as the superuser or another user, as specified in the sudoers file. The real and effective uid and gid are set to match those of the target user as specified in the passwd file and the group vector is initialized based on the group file (unless the -P option was specified). If the invoking user is root or if the target user is the same as the invoking user, no password is required. Otherwise, sudo requires that users authenticate themselves with a password by default (NOTE: in the default configuration this is the user’s password, not the root password). Once a user has been authenticated, a timestamp is updated and the user may then use sudo without a password for a short period of time (15 minutes unless overridden in sudoers).

Why use sudo?

So now that we know what sudo is, why use it? Well, one of the main (and probably biggest reasons) for using sudo is giving users and groups access to commands that as a normal user they wouldn’t normally be able to use.

If configured correctly you can have all commands run through sudo logged, which you can then do wonderous things with like have emailed to you as I do, using Logwatch.

sudo uses the users password, this means no revealing root passwords to random users in order to allow them to run a few extra commands that they need to use. “But I can just change access permissions on programs if I want them accessible” I hear you cry, of course you can, but there are some things you simply don’t want to expose and yes, you can argue that you just add a user to a group that has permissions but sudo is just a better way of controlling access.

Installing sudo

So first things first, lets install sudo.

apt-get install sudo

Chances are you’ve probably already got sudo installed but depending on how you installed Debian (or whichever flavour you’re using) you may not have chosen to install it.

So how do I use sudo?

Well, this is what man sudo is for, but basically it’s simple:

sudo cat /etc/issue

Yes, this command would work without the need for sudo, but I wanted a simple example usage.

Adding users to sudo

There are a couple of ways of doing this, you can either edit /etc/sudoers with your favourite editor or use visudo. visudo will use which ever editor you have set using export. I’ve seen some distributions that do not allow direct access to /etc/sudoers and force you to use visudo, I’ve also read and seen that visudo does some checking before saving. I personally know enough and feel comfortable enough with the sudoers file to edit it directly, but that’s just my choice.

So, open your sudoers list using your chosen method, you should see something similar to this:

root ALL=(ALL) ALL

So, what does this mean? Well, it’s actually surprisingly simple. The first part “root” is the name of the user, the second ALL is the host that this definition belongs to, chances are you don’t need to change this, the third ALL is the user(s) to allow the user to run commands as and the final ALL is a list of commands that the user can run.

So, this might be a bit daunting from that explanation, so lets take a look at a user I’ll create for myself

kura ALL=(root) /usr/bin/apt-get, /usr/bin/vi

So lets break that down; the user kura can run the commands /usr/bin/apt-get and /usr/bin/vi as the user root on all hosts.

Hopefully that makes it simple to understand. For the user that the commands are run as you can user any user or daemon on the server, for example root could be another user, in the following example I will use a different user called admin.

kura ALL=(admin) /usr/bin/apt-get, /usr/bin/vi

Adding groups to sudoers

The approach for this is exactly the same as for users except you use % to define a group.

%sudoers ALL=(root) /usr/bin/apt-get, /usr/bin/vi

And now to wrap this article up…

How I personally use sudoers

I use sudoers on all of my servers and my approach to locking them down is simple; I have a user that has access to ALL users and ALL commands, I then have a group called sudoers that users can be added to that have access to some commands that they may need from time to time, giving them the ability to do things like tailing system logs. I also have Logwatch installed which will email me with my daily log report which includes a list of all users that ran commands via sudo and tells me which commands they ran. This way I can keep an eye on them.

Kura

Anarchist. Pessimist. Bipolar. Hacker. Hyperpolyglot. Musician. Ex-(semi-)pro gamer. They/Them.

Kura
View Source