Assigning privileges with sudo and PolicyKit

Licensed to Manage

© Aleksey Mnogosmyslov, 123RF.com

© Aleksey Mnogosmyslov, 123RF.com

Article from Issue 146/2013
Author(s):

If you give users who are usually supervised more scope to help themselves, they will need additional privileges. The sudo tool and the PolicyKit authorization service can control who does what on Linux.

For admins, it would be a relief if regular users were able to handle minor management tasks, such as updating software, themselves. The only problem is that apt-get requires administrative privileges, and you would not typically want to grant those to a regular user. Fortunately, admins can work with sudo or the PolicyKit authorization service to allow specific actions in a targeted way.

Sudo

The sudo tools runs commands with a different user's account. For apt-get upgrade, this would be the all-powerful root. Which users are allowed to use sudo with what programs is defined in the /etc/sudoers configuration file. For example, to allow user klaus to update his own computer named marvin, you would add the following line to the /etc/sudoers file:

klaus marvin=(ALL) NOPASSWD:/usr/bin/apt-get upgrade

[...]

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