Root and Sudo
Sudoers
I mentioned the Sudoers file briefly in the main Linux write up, but here we will go more in depth about it. Here is a typical Sudoers file: Defaults env_reset Defaults mail_badpass Defaults secure_path="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin" # This fixes CVE-2005-4890 and possibly breaks some versions of kdesu # (#1011624, https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=452532) Defaults use_pty # This preserves proxy settings from user environments of root # equivalent users (group sudo) #Defaults:%sudo env_keep += "http_proxy https_proxy ftp_proxy all_proxy no_proxy" # This allows running arbitrary commands, but so does ALL, and it means # different sudoers have their choice of editor respected. #Defaults:%sudo env_keep += "EDITOR" # Completely harmless preservation of a user preference. #Defaults:%sudo env_keep += "GREP_COLOR" # While you shouldn't normally run git as root, you need to with etckeeper #Defaults:%sudo env_keep += "GIT_AUTHOR_* GIT_COMMITTER_*" # Per-user preferences; root won't have sensible values for them. #Defaults:%sudo env_keep += "EMAIL DEBEMAIL DEBFULLNAME" # "sudo scp" or "sudo rsync" should be able to use your SSH agent. #Defaults:%sudo env_keep += "SSH_AGENT_PID SSH_AUTH_SOCK" # Ditto for GPG agent #Defaults:%sudo env_keep += "GPG_AGENT_INFO" # Host alias specification # User alias specification # Cmnd alias specification # User privilege specification root ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL # Allow members of group sudo to execute any command %sudo ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL # See sudoers(5) for more information on "@include" directives: brendan ALL = (root) NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/firefox-esr @includedir /etc/sudoers.d