[OT] sudo, why not su?

John Nilsson john at milsson.nu
Mon Aug 8 12:15:47 UTC 2005


On mån, 2005-08-08 at 09:05 +0100, Magnus Therning wrote:
>  No, it's not possible to have su ask for the calling user's password.
> 
> >This has been a fun question to work on.  Thanks for the challenge.
> 
> It's been a challenge trying to get people to understand what I wanted
> to know.

I've reread the thread and I still don't get why "sudo su" isn't what
you want.

It seems that you'd like to have a privileged group of people who are
able to login as root but are authenticated with their own passwords
instead.

You also stated that there is a number of ways to get su to not ask for
a password, but you want the user to authenticate with their password
instead of having a shared password. When running "sudo su" you run su
with root privileges, thus it wont ask for roots password, but sudo will
ask for the user password.

You keep saying that you don't want the effect of running "sudo su" but
that you want su to behave like sudo. I'm guessing that by that you mean
that when a user runs su it should behace EXACTLY as if user had ran
"sudo su" BUT it should be the su binary doing it, alone.

As other have pointet out, that is not what su is for, that is what sudo
is for. And if you wan't to do what you want to do you HAVE to use booth
tools.

I'm continuing this thread for the simple reason that I am realy curious
to why I don't understand what you want.

/John





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