Ubuntu keep admin rights; skip entering password and sudo

rootsudoUbuntu

I was wondering if there is a way to enter in my admin password someplace just once and keep it for my entire time logged in. I hate having to type sudo command-name* every five seconds, or typing in the password every time the system wants to perform a task. Is there a way to just enter it once for my session and have it be remembered.

I know this is bad practice, but this is on a VM that I don't care about.

Best Answer

sudo su will work - You will have a shell as root until you close it, as will giving root a password using passwd root and logging in directly as root. Both of these are heavily frowned upon for many reasons that have been listed here the dozens of other times this question has been asked.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – how can I avoid typing a password on every admin action

sudo visudo and add the following line:

MYUSERNAME ALL=NOPASSWD: ALL

replacing MYUSERNAME with your username :)

This allows your user account to sudo any command without requiring a password. Note that there are inherent security risks with this though - for example if someone can persuade you to run a script, that script could sudo and do things as root without you noticing. It is convenient though.

Ssh-agent forwarding and sudo to another user

As you mentioned, the environment variables are removed by sudo, for security reasons.

But fortunately sudo is quite configurable: you can tell it precisely which environment variables you want to keep thanks to the env_keep configuration option in /etc/sudoers.

For agent forwarding, you need to keep the SSH_AUTH_SOCK environment variable. To do so, simply edit your /etc/sudoers configuration file (always using visudo) and set the env_keep option to the appropriate users. If you want this option to be set for all users, use the Defaults line like this:

Defaults    env_keep+=SSH_AUTH_SOCK

man sudoers for more details.

You should now be able to do something like this (provided user1's public key is present in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys in user1@serverA and user2@serverB, and serverA's /etc/sudoers file is setup as indicated above):

user1@mymachine> eval `ssh-agent`  # starts ssh-agent
user1@mymachine> ssh-add           # add user1's key to agent (requires pwd)
user1@mymachine> ssh -A serverA    # no pwd required + agent forwarding activated
user1@serverA> sudo su - user2     # sudo keeps agent forwarding active :-)
user2@serverA> ssh serverB         # goto user2@serverB w/o typing pwd again...
user2@serverB>                     # ...because forwarding still works

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – how can I avoid typing a password on every admin action

Ssh-agent forwarding and sudo to another user

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