[PLUG] hostnames in sudoers file?

[Wil Cooley]

On Wed, 2007-01-24 at 10:30 -0800, Robert Anderson wrote:
> Can someone help me understand why one would use several hostnames in a
> sudoers file? It's my understanding that running sudo will only execute
> commands locally. In other words, you cannot grant remote sudo permissions
> in a local sudoers file....right? My only guess is that it is for the
> convenience of managing a single sudoers file that is distributed to several
> hosts. If this is the case, is there an easy way to distribute sudoers files
> to many hosts, other than simply scp'ing the file? Or is there a way to
> "host" a master sudoers file that all the hosts will look to when sudo is
> run? Ouch, that sounds like a potential security risk.
> 
> Thanks in advance.

On larger managed networks, configuration files are managed centrally
and then distributed out to the various hosts.  Being able to specify
host-specific options means that you can have one sudoers file that
works across many systems.

As far as means of distribution, there are a number of tools.  Older
home-brewed systems used rdist, rsync, etc.  I am currently using
cfengine[1], although I've been intending to look at puppet[2].  There
are other tools too; see http://www.infrastructures.org for a paper and
discussion.

1. http://www.cfengine.org
2. http://reductivelabs.com/projects/puppet/

Wil
-- 
Wil Cooley <wcooley at nakedape.cc>
http://nakedape.cc
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