sudo and /etc/sudoers

[Ray Parrish]

Smoot Carl-Mitchell wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-12-30 at 08:20 -0500, Mark Haney wrote:
>
>   
>> Sudo is not only important, it's vital for secure consistent and 
>> granular control of root permissions for users.  Without it, you can't 
>> manage controls OR figure out who did what if an audit trail is needed.
>>     
>
> Amen to this.  sudo is not perfect in these regards, but it is a heck of
> a lot better than running root shells which until sudo came along was
> the only way to manage Unix systems.  Security experts have known for a
> long time the weakness of having uid "0" be a "special" account.  Check
> out the kernel sources sometime and see how many places there are checks
> to see if the effective userid is zero.
>
> Ideally, there would be no "root" account.  Access privileges would be
> controlled by a more granular system.  sudo is an attempt to implement
> such a system on top of the imperfect uid "0" system.
>   
Hello,

You just jogged me out of my complacency with the uid 0 information 
there. Tell me if there is a problem with the following information 
gleaned from System Monitor.

/usr/bin/ssh-agent /usr/bin/seahorse-agent --execute 
x-session-manager    (this is the command line for ssh-agent)
/usr/bin/X :0 -br -audit 0 -auth /var/lib/gdm:0,Xauth -nolisten tcp 
vt7    (this is the command line for Xorg)
watchdog/0   (I searched for this package in synaptic, and it claims 
this isn't installed)
/usr/bin/seahorse-agent --execute x-session-manager  (same as first 
line, but without ssh running it)
nautilus --no-default-window --sm-client-id default2   (I do not have 
Nautilus running...why is this there?)
migration/0  (what is this?)
ksoftirqd/0  (don't know what this is either??)
kondemand/0  (this one is another mystery to me...)
kblockd/0  ( also don't know what this is)
hald-addon-storage: polling /dev/sdc0 (every 16 secs)
hald-addon-storage: polling /dev/sde (every 16 secs)
hald-addon-storage: polling /dev/sdc (every 16 secs)
hald-addon-storage: polling /dev/sdb (every 16 secs)
hald-addon-storage: polling /dev/sdd (every 16 secs)  [why are my drives 
being polled every 16 seconds?]
gnome-panel ---sm-client-id default1 [I note that this client id differs 
from the one shown for Nautilus above]
I also have a getty process running on tty1 through tty6, should all of 
those be running?
dcopserver [kdeinit] --nosid --suicide   (what the heck is this?)

Terminal command sudo fdisk -l report s the following for my drive which 
is /dev/sda

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1        5197    41744871    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2            5198       19457   114543450    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5            5198        7224    16281846    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda6            7225       12992    46331428+  83  Linux
/dev/sda7           12993       15529    20378421    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda8           15530       16804    10241406    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda9           16805       19457    21310191    7  HPFS/NTFS

I don't know where it's getting the idea that sda2 is a win95 file 
system as I've never had 95 on this machine, it came with Win XP home on it.

There is no Linux swap shown, as I'm using a swap file, due to my 
neglecting to have set up a swap partition during a re-install of Ubuntu.

I'm aware that ssh is used for secure connections over a network, but 
I'm on a standalone machine here, with only a DSL connection to the 
Internet, so who's using ssh?

I'm concerned because when I first started using Ubuntu it was very 
snappy, with no delays when switching programs, and now it has developed 
the habit of graying out whichever program I am changing to quite 
frequently, which is beginning to annoy me mightily.

Does anyone see any problems with the above command lines?

By the way, sorry to jump in on this thread, but that information about 
root being uid 0 got me concerned with all the 0 parameters in the 
command lines that are running here.

Thanks for any help you can be with helping this relatively new Ubuntu 
user to understand what is running on his system.

Later, Ray Parrish


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