Another Reason to Use Visudo

on Jan. 21, 2014, 9:07 p.m.

Today I learned that one REALLY should use visudo. Today a co-worker was on a Solaris box after a while called me over because he could not figure out how this user group had sudo rights when their was no mention of it in /etc/sudoers. After both being stumped for about 10 minutes, I asked if the user id of the user was id 0; negative. I paused then thought "what happens when you run visudo?" Sure enough there it was but it lead to the question of "where the hell was the configuration file for the groups?!" After some googling, my coworker found a small article that said:


Neither Solaris 9 or 10 include sudo - it wasn't bundled with Solaris
until Solaris 11 - so for Solaris 9 & 10 the answer is “Whatever path
was compiled into whatever version you installed.” However, one of the
places to get sudo is OpenCSW. You can install a precompiled package.
The sudoers file is then /etc/opt/csw/sudoers.

So there you go, /etc/opt/csw/sudoers, but in the future just use visudo.