The sys admin's daily grind: sudoers
Charly's Column – sudoersn
"I've seen penguins that can type better than that." If you give sudo the wrong password, you deserve to be shouted at, says sys admin columnist Charly. He is not exempt from the insult and sees it as an opportunity to raise sudoing awareness.
If you work with and on Linux, you are likely to type sudo regularly to execute programs with another user's privileges – typically the superuser's. sudo will then understandably ask for the appropriate password. In times when my fingers refuse to obey me and I enter the secret password wrong three times in succession, sudo rejects my request to escalate. Okay, if you fail to type the password correctly despite having had three attempts, maybe you shouldn't be messing around on the system with root privileges. So far, so good, but free software can surely offer more than that!
sudo visudo
sudo looks for its default settings in the /etc/sudoers file. You can't just open it with an editor; instead, you need to use the visudo command – assuming you're root. (If I'm on the road as a user, I have to type sudo visudo, which strangely makes me laugh.) At the beginning of the file are some lines that start with Defaults. You need to add two lines here (Figure 1):
Defaults insults Defaults passwd_tries=5
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
US / Canada
UK / Australia
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
CachyOS Now Lets Users Choose Their Shell
Imagine getting the opportunity to select which shell you want during the installation of your favorite Linux distribution. That's now a thing.
-
Wayland 1.24 Released with Fixes and New Features
Wayland continues to move forward, while X11 slowly vanishes into the shadows, and the latest release includes plenty of improvements.
-
Bugs Found in sudo
Two critical flaws allow users to gain access to root privileges.
-
Fedora Continues 32-Bit Support
In a move that should come as a relief to some portions of the Linux community, Fedora will continue supporting 32-bit architecture.
-
Linux Kernel 6.17 Drops bcachefs
After a clash over some late fixes and disagreements between bcachefs's lead developer and Linus Torvalds, bachefs is out.
-
ONLYOFFICE v9 Embraces AI
Like nearly all office suites on the market (except LibreOffice), ONLYOFFICE has decided to go the AI route.
-
Two Local Privilege Escalation Flaws Discovered in Linux
Qualys researchers have discovered two local privilege escalation vulnerabilities that allow hackers to gain root privileges on major Linux distributions.
-
New TUXEDO InfinityBook Pro Powered by AMD Ryzen AI 300
The TUXEDO InfinityBook Pro 14 Gen10 offers serious power that is ready for your business, development, or entertainment needs.
-
LibreOffice Tested as Possible Office 365 Alternative
Another major organization has decided to test the possibility of migrating from Microsoft's Office 365 to LibreOffice.
-
Linux Mint 20 Reaches EOL
With Linux Mint 20 at its end of life, the time has arrived to upgrade to Linux Mint 22.