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
-
Red Hat Releases RHEL 10 Early
Red Hat quietly rolled out the official release of RHEL 10.0 a bit early.
-
openSUSE Joins End of 10
openSUSE has decided to not only join the End of 10 movement but it also will no longer support the Deepin Desktop Environment.
-
New Version of Flatpak Released
Flatpak 1.16.1 is now available as the latest, stable version with various improvements.
-
IBM Announces Powerhouse Linux Server
IBM has unleashed a seriously powerful Linux server with the LinuxONE Emperor 5.
-
Plasma Ends LTS Releases
The KDE Plasma development team is doing away with the LTS releases for a good reason.
-
Arch Linux Available for Windows Subsystem for Linux
If you've ever wanted to use a rolling release distribution with WSL, now's your chance.
-
System76 Releases COSMIC Alpha 7
With scores of bug fixes and a really cool workspaces feature, COSMIC is looking to soon migrate from alpha to beta.
-
OpenMandriva Lx 6.0 Available for Installation
The latest release of OpenMandriva has arrived with a new kernel, an updated Plasma desktop, and a server edition.
-
TrueNAS 25.04 Arrives with Thousands of Changes
One of the most popular Linux-based NAS solutions has rolled out the latest edition, based on Ubuntu 25.04.
-
Fedora 42 Available with Two New Spins
The latest release from the Fedora Project includes the usual updates, a new kernel, an official KDE Plasma spin, and a new System76 spin.