Today, I did a fresh installation of Ubuntu 9.04 inside virtual box. My original idea was to play with sudoers and sudo command. I edited /etc/sudoers and logged out. Next time I tried to sudo , I go some parse error in /etc/sudoers. I was stuck . I needed sudo for modifying the file. But sudo was preventing me because of the error.

Ubuntu's use of sudo to simplify Linux administration is ingenious, but barely scratches the surface of what sudo can do. Follow along as Yvo Van Doorn of Likewise Software unlocks the powers of sudo.

What if you want one user to run a command as an another system user without exchanging passwords. For example, you may want an user john to run a find command or custom bash shell script as an user greg or even as a user root ( superuser ) without password exchange. In this case a sudo utility with its /etc/sudoers configuration file will be your friend.

Is sudo really needed everywhere ? Of course not ! This article tries to explain why sudo is worse than su for most desktop *nix users out there.

I recently read a blog posting that denounced the use of sudo as insecure. My first reaction was that the author had no idea how to use sudo properly or why you would want to.

Many organizations have attempted to use open source sudo as their privileged identity management solution. While sudo might be a viable solution for small scale organizations, CSOs managing large IT environments are consistently discovering that sudo creates security, compliance and productivity challenges to large enterprises seeking to protect critical assets.

Sudo which is su “do” allows a system administrator to delegate authority to give certain users (or groups of users) the ability to run some (or all) commands as root or another user while providing an audit trail of the commands and their arguments.sudo allows a permitted user to execute a command as the superuser or another user, as specified in the sudoers file.

How many times did you type a command and forgot to type sudo first ? What do you want to say when that happens ? No, not that…you might want to say : sudo !!

This short howto is about setting up sudo on Red Hat Entreprise Linux and its derivates CentOS and Scientific Linux. It also gives a quick introduction on using vi (visudo).