Re: Root access loggin

--On Tuesday, July 24, 2007 23:00:47 +0100 Vince Hoffman-Kazlauskas <jhary@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

\ \ Paul Schmehl wrote:
--On Tuesday, July 24, 2007 16:01:33 -0400 Ian Lord
<mailing-lists@xxxxxxx> wrote:



-----Original Message-----
From: John Fitzgerald [mailto:jjfitzgerald@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: 24 juillet 2007 15:42
To: Tom Grove
Cc: freebsd-questions@xxxxxxxxxxx; Ian Lord
Subject: Re: Root access loggin

I may be misunderstanding this, but wouldn't allowing only certain
commands with sudo assume that the user actually knows what commands
are needed by the user? In this situation it seems like the whole
reason to grant access to the server was because the user _doesn't_
know what needs to be done.
~~

Exactly, I don't know what needs to be done, and they don't neither.
That's why they need to browse around trying to figure out why their
installer doesn't work.

Sudo wouldn't be any help here cause I would need to pre approve
commands
and I don't know which one will be needed.

You seem to have a mistaken understanding of sudo. You can grant them
access to everything that root has simply by adding their account to
the wheel group and using visudo to grant wheel access to everything
that root has access to. You can do this with or without a
requirement to type your password when you use sudo.

This will allow them to do everything they want while logging every
command they type. And that seems to be exactly what you want. So,
rather than giving them the root password, create an account for them,
add it to the wheel group and use visudo to edit
/usr/local/etc/sudoers to grant wheel access to everything. (DO NOT
edit the file with vi!)

To add the wheel group to a user:
pw usermod username -G wheel

Granting access to wheel should be self-explanatory:

# Uncomment to allow people in group wheel to run all commands
%wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL
# %wheel ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL

That way everything they do is logged, and you don't have to
compromise your root password.

The problem here is that the first command I type in this situation if i
need to run multiple commands as root it sudo su -
after that nothing is logged. I agree with Lowell that watch(8) is
probably the way to go.

Well sure, but then you have a log entry where the vendor's tech clearly tried to circumvent your restrictions. That's cause for immediate revocation of access and escalation of the issue to the vendor. (Not that you shouldn't use watch!)

--
Paul Schmehl (pauls@xxxxxxxxxxxx)
Senior Information Security Analyst
The University of Texas at Dallas
http://www.utdallas.edu/ir/security/

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Help with sudoers and wheel - "Old Guy" or anyone?
    ... (I am root on my home systems, and have "root" user accounts at work, ... Notice - no permissions for normal users to run. ... members of the 'wheel' group could run those commands. ... >Use halt, reboot, shutdown, mount, and tcpdump commands. ...
    (comp.os.linux)
  • Re: Help with sudoers and wheel - "Old Guy" or anyone?
    ... > gateway for home LAN and ADSL Internet. ... > explain the wheel group. ... Without having su sudo ... > like to know about the specific commands like for adding groups. ...
    (comp.os.linux)
  • RE: Root access loggin
    ... commands with sudo assume that the user actually knows what commands ... Sudo wouldn't be any help here cause I would need to pre approve commands ... You can grant them access to everything that root has simply by adding their account to the wheel group and using visudo to grant wheel access to everything that root has access to. ...
    (freebsd-questions)
  • Re: sudo doesnt work, Im not in sudoers file, but I am.
    ... user gene is not allowed to execute '/bin/ls -l' as root on ... ~ %wheel ALL=ALL ...
    (Fedora)
  • Re: use sudo without having to type password?
    ... > There are lots of very valid reasons for having password-less sudo ... > commands available. ... >> If you have to do anything as root, you should have to type a password ... It should stand as a warning that they're about to ...
    (alt.os.linux)