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On the surface, sudo seems fairly straightforward, so it’s interesting to hear how much work has gone into it! Do you have any interesting facts or anecdotes yo
by noahjk 3y ago
On the surface, sudo seems fairly straightforward, so it’s interesting to hear how much work has gone into it! Do you have any interesting facts or anecdotes you’d care to share?
- nolok 3y agoThe key is in "on the surface". While the common usage of sudo is fairly straightforward, you me and most people use like 5% of it. The trick is in all the side shows.
- yesimahuman 3y agoMakes you wonder then why it does so much, if those rarely used features increase the surface area of possible exploits? This is just a question I’ve had about *nix utilities in general, since sudo is hardly the only tool with obscure flags and features
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoBecause the long tail of features is useful to someone. Mind, I like doas for this reason, but having the more feature rich option available makes sense.
- __turbobrew__ 3y agoThis is part of what the openbsd ‘doas’ was trying to solve. They drastically reduced the functionality to reduce the attack surface.
- coggs 3y agoHackaday interviewed me about the origin story - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaAwl3HN5ds&ab_channel=HACKADAY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaAwl3HN5ds&ab_channel=HACKA...
- ralgozino 3y agogreat story! also, TIL that I've been pronouncing `sudo` wrong, I was 100% sure that it was supposed to be like pseudo, but I guess that is a myth :) It's so great to be able to listen and learn from the people that invented these important building blocks themselves, I feel lucky. Thanks for sharing.
- folmar 3y ago> sudo seems fairly straightforward `su` is straightforward, `sudo` is a very powerful piece of software and the configuration has a lot of edge cases.
- SoftTalker 3y agoYes, have a read of the sudoers man page and marvel at the complexity of the configuration, and wonder about your chances of getting it right if you are not well-experienced. This is the config file with the infamous paragraph: The sudoers grammar will be described below in Extended Backus-Naur Form (EBNF). Don’t despair if you are unfamiliar with EBNF; it is fairly simple, and the definitions below are annotated. OpenBSD replaced sudo with their own "doas" command a few years ago; the doas.conf manual page is about 100 lines; sudoers is over 2,000.