Linux – sudo denied – what is missing

fedoralinuxsudo

I did the following:

  • Added user to sys group. (usermod -g sys liveuser)

  • Verified user in sys group (I had to log out and log
    in to see changes in terminal even though I was seeing
    users and groups in the GUI tool)

  • Used su mode to edit the sudoers file via visudo (:wq once
    verified) file to give %sys (user group) various
    permissions including the DELEGATING command group that
    includes, among others, the permission to run
    usr/sbin/visudo (%sys ALL = SOFTWARE, DELEGATING, ….
    etc)

  • Verified that file was successfully edited

  • Exited su mode and tried to run visudo.

No success. Still says liveuser is not privileged to run
visudo as root. Scanned several articles and the man file
and could not find anything else. What is missing?? Thanks

Best Answer

This leads me to believe that 'visudo' is not really in the group that you think it is (NETWORKING, SOFTWARE, SERVICES, STORAGE, DELEGATING, PROCESSES, LOCATE, DRIVERS). Have you checked to ensure that /usr/sbin/visudo is a real file (not a symlink)?

I'm on CentOS 5, but the configuration should be very similar. My configuration for DELEGATING is:

## Delegating permissions
Cmnd_Alias DELEGATING = /usr/sbin/visudo, /bin/chown, /bin/chmod, /bin/chgrp

If this is Fedora Core 10, as the tag suggests, try changing the user to group 'wheel' and un-commenting the line that says:

## Allows people in group wheel to run all commands
%wheel  ALL=(ALL)       ALL

If that works, then sudo is working properly. As another user recommends, when logged in as 'liveuser', you still need to run:

sudo visudo
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