[OT] sudo, why not su?

Magnus Therning magnus at therning.org
Mon Aug 8 08:12:22 UTC 2005


On Mon, Aug 08, 2005 at 05:26:33AM +0200, John Nilsson wrote:
>On sön, 2005-08-07 at 23:49 +0100, Magnus Therning wrote:
>> On Sun, Aug 07, 2005 at 11:06:50PM +0200, John Nilsson wrote:
>> >On sön, 2005-08-07 at 20:08 +0100, Magnus Therning wrote:
>> >> Now, what I wonder is if there is a way to set up your system such that
>> >> the following is possible:
>> >> 
>> >>  usr1$ su -c cmd
>> >>  Password: <pwd1>
>> >
>> >john at newkid:~$ sudo su - -c whoami
>> >Password:
>> >root
>> >
>> >Does that do what you want?
>> 
>> No!
>> 
>> I want to run su and enter my own password!
>
>The above did that...
>
>Why are you so hooked up on the su binary? I really don't understand the
>difference. As previously stated, you can use alias to make it almost
>identical.

Read the whole thread, then you'd understand why I'm "so hooked up on
the su binary".

The difference is that I use sudo, and my colleague use su. I wanted to
know exactly what the benefit of sudo is over su. In the most simple
usage of sudo (as in a newly installed Ubuntu) the benefit is that sudo
requires the user's password, su requires root's password. If su could,
in some way, be made to require the calling user's password then that
difference would disappear and, in that very simple scenario, su and
sudo would be so similar that either could be used.

It seems that there is no way (short of adding code either to su or
write a new pam-module) to set up a system in such a way that su accepts
the user's password. So, the answer to my original question is "No!".

/M

-- 
Magnus Therning                    (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4)
magnus at therning.org
http://therning.org/magnus

Software is not manufactured, it is something you write and publish.
Keep Europe free from software patents, we do not want censorship
by patent law on written works.

Child pornography -- I never heard of it as a problem five years ago,
but now it's brought up constantly. I think it's the new Red-baiting.
The people in Burma don't understand how it is that we are focusing
our whole crypto policy on catching child pornographers. If you think
that cryptography is good for society you have to apologize and say
that you are against child pornography...  The fact that I even have
to say that is an indication of how effective this Red-baiting is... I
think that we can't let our civil liberties for the society at large
be determined by government policy towards a tiny segment of the
criminal population.
      -- Philip Zimmermann
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