Book Review: Sudo Mastery: User Access Control For Real People 83
Saint Aardvark writes "If you're a Unix or Linux sysadmin, you know sudo: it's that command that lets you run single commands as root from your own account, rather than logging in as root. And if you're like me, here's what you know about configuring sudo:
1.) Run sudoedit and uncomment the line that says "%wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL".
2.) Make sure you're in the wheel group.
3.) Profit!
If you're a sysadmin, you need to stop people from shooting themselves in the foot. There should be some way of restricting use, right? Just gotta check out the man page.... And that's where I stopped, every time. I've yet to truly understand Extended Backus-Naur Form, and my eyes would glaze over. And so I'd go back to putting some small number of people in the 'wheel' group, and letting them run sudo, and cleaning up the occasional mess afterward. Fortunately, Michael W. Lucas has written Sudo Mastery: User Access Control for Real People." Keep reading for the rest of Saint Aardvark's review.
If his name sounds familiar, there's a reason for that: he's been cranking out excellent technical books for a long time, on everything from FreeBSD to Cisco routers to DNSSEC. He takes deep, involved subjects that you don't even know you need to know more about, and he makes them understandable. It's a good trick, and we're lucky he's turned his attention to sudo.
1.) Run sudoedit and uncomment the line that says "%wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL".
2.) Make sure you're in the wheel group.
3.) Profit!
If you're a sysadmin, you need to stop people from shooting themselves in the foot. There should be some way of restricting use, right? Just gotta check out the man page.... And that's where I stopped, every time. I've yet to truly understand Extended Backus-Naur Form, and my eyes would glaze over. And so I'd go back to putting some small number of people in the 'wheel' group, and letting them run sudo, and cleaning up the occasional mess afterward. Fortunately, Michael W. Lucas has written Sudo Mastery: User Access Control for Real People." Keep reading for the rest of Saint Aardvark's review.
| Sudo Mastery: User Access Control For Real People | |
| author | Michael W. Lucas |
| pages | 144 |
| publisher | Tilted Windmill Press |
| rating | 10/10 |
| reviewer | Saint Aardvark |
| ISBN | 1493626205 |
| summary | Teaches all there is to know about sudo |
The book clocks in at 144 pages (print version), and it's packed with information from start to finish. Lucas starts with the why and how of sudo, explaining why you need to know it and how sudo protects you. He moves on to the syntax; it's kind of a bear at first, but Chapter 2, "sudo and sudoers", takes care of that nicely. Have you locked yourself out of sudo with a poor edit? I have; I've even managed to do it on many machines, all at once, by distributing that edit with CFEngine. Lucas covers this in Chapter 3, "Editing and Testing Sudoers", a chapter that would have saved my butt. By the time you've added a few entries, you're probably ready for Chapter 4, "Lists and Aliases".
sudo has lots of ways to avoid repeating yourself, and I picked up a few tricks from this chapter I didn't know about — including that sudo can run commands as users other than root. Need to restart Tomcat as the tomcat user? There's a sudoers line for that. I'm ashamed to admit that I didn't know this.
There is a lot more in this book, too. You can override sudo defaults for different commands or users. You can stuff sudo directives into LDAP and stop copying files around. You can edit files with sudoedit. You can record people's sudo commands, and play them back using sudoreplay. The list goes on.
Sounds like a lot, doesn't it? It is. But the book flies by, because Lucas is a good writer: he packs a lot of information into the pages while remaining engaging and funny. The anecdotes are informative, the banter is witty, and there's no dry or boring to be found anywhere.
Shortcomings: Maybe you don't like humor in your tech books; if so, you could pass this up, but you'd be missing out. There wasn't an index in the EPUB version I got, which I always miss. Other than that: I'm mad Lucas didn't write this book ten years ago.
You can purchase The Plateau Effect: Getting from Stuck to Success from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews (sci-fi included) -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Correct link for buying the book (Score:5, Informative)
Hi all -- I submitted this review, but it looks like something ate the link for the book. Here's where to buy it:
I believe the Amazon link gives the author a few more shekels, but he makes the most money from the first link; details from his website's page on this book. [michaelwlucas.com]