Comment Re:sudoedit? visudo! (Score 1) 83
Yeah, they got the link wrong...not sure what happened there.
Yeah, they got the link wrong...not sure what happened there.
Hi all -- I submitted this review, but it looks like something ate the link for the book. Here's where to buy it:
I believe the Amazon link gives the author a few more shekels, but he makes the most money from the first link; details from his website's page on this book.
Okay, so you can now run any command as root. Awesome! But not everyone is as careful as you are (or at least, as you like to think you are). If you're a sysadmin, you need to stop people from shooting themselves in the foot. (Might also want to stop yourself from self-inflicted gunshot wounds.) There should be some way of restricting use, right? Just gotta check out the man page.... And that's where I stopped, every time. I've yet to truly understand Extended Backus-Naur Form (sue me), and my eyes would glaze over. And so I'd go back to putting some small number of people in the "wheel" group, and letting them run sudo, and cleaning up the occasional mess afterward.
Fortunately, Michael W. Lucas has written "Sudo Mastery: User Access Control for Real People". If his name sounds familiar, there's a reason for that: he's been cranking out excellent technical books for a long time, on everything from FreeBSD to Cisco routers to DNSSEC. He just, like, does this: he takes deep, involved subjects that you don't even know you need to know more about, and he makes them understandable. It's a good trick, and we're lucky he's turned his attention to sudo.
The book clocks in at 144 pages (print version), and it's packed with information from start to finish. Lucas starts with the why and how of sudo, explaining why you need to know it and how sudo protects you. He moves on to the syntax; it's kind of a bear at first, but Chapter 2, "sudo and sudoers", takes care of that nicely. Have you locked yourself out of sudo with a poor edit? I have; I've even managed to do it on many machines, all at once, by distributing that edit with CFEngine. Lucas covers this in Chapter 3, "Editing and Testing Sudoers", a chapter that would have saved my butt. By the time you've added a few entries, you're probably ready for Chapter 4, "Lists and Aliases".
sudo has lots of ways to avoid repeating yourself, and I picked up a few tricks from this chapter I didn't know about — including that sudo can run commands as users other than root. Need to restart Tomcat as the tomcat user? There's a sudoers line for that. I'm ashamed to admit that I didn't know this.
There is a lot more in this book, too. You can override sudo defaults for different commands or users (you can change the lecture text; maybe sometimes there *is* a technical solution for a social problem...). You can stuff sudo directives into LDAP and stop copying files around. You can edit files with sudoedit. You can record people's sudo commands, and play them back using sudoreplay. The list goes on.
Sounds like a lot, doesn't it? It is. But the book flies by, because Lucas is a good writer: he packs a lot of information into the pages while remaining engaging and funny. The anecdotes are informative, the banter is witty, and there's no dry or boring to be found anywhere.
Shortcomings: Maybe you don't like humour in your tech books; if so, you could pass this up, but man, you'd be missing out. There wasn't an index in the EPUB version I got, which I always miss. Other than that: I'm mad Lucas didn't write this book ten years ago.
Score: 10 out of 10. If you're a Linux or Unix sysadmin, you need this book; it's just that simple.
Where to buy:
From http://www.newspacejournal.com/2013/02/21/new-insights-on-that-private-crewed-mars-mission/:
This publication obtained a copy of the paper Tito et al. plan to present at the conference, discussing a crewed free-return Mars mission that would fly by Mars, but not go into orbit around the planet or land on it. This 501-day mission would launch in January 2018, using a modified SpaceX Dragon spacecraft launched on a Falcon Heavy rocket. According to the paper, existing environmental control and life support system (ECLSS) technologies would allow such a spacecraft to support two people for the mission, although in Spartan condition. âoeCrew comfort is limited to survival needs only. For example, sponge baths are acceptable, with no need for showers,â the paper states.
The IEEE Aerospace Conference is in March -- next month. That's pretty interesting timing.
I respectfully disagree. I've been to four LISA conferences (sysadmin conference run by USENIX) since 2006, and I see very little that is comparable; there are the various LOPSA conferences (LOPSA-EAST, Cascadia IT Conference), but they're simply not at LISA's scale. Want to hang out with a thousand other sysadmins? Get training from Ted T'so on recovering borked disks? See what Google is up to -- or the small IT shop at the university down the coast with 1/20000th the budget? There's simply nothing else out there that matches it.
As for the rest of the conferences, all I know is the summaries I've read in
I don't have the breadth of experience you do; I concentrate on system administration because I love it, and I've been doing it less than ten years. I'm definitely an interested amateur (at best) when it comes to topics like security, or file systems, or OS design. But I'm always surprised how much of USENIX conference material touches on areas of interest or direct relevance to me, and at the very least browsing their papers is a wonderful introduction to some research and work I'd miss otherwise. I'm sure (with the exception of LISA) there are more focused conferences, or better known ones (DefCon is one that springs to mind). But I can't agree that USENIX is "past its sell date".
(And in passing, thanks very kindly for all the work you've done for the Open Source/Free Software community. Kinda boggles my mind that I'm debating you...)
Ha...I recognize the panel on the tape drive here:
I wasn't around then, but I've been reading up on him and all the rest of the Apollo astronauts since. I'm filled with wonder every time I think about it.
Thank you for everything, sir. I hope your eternity is a pleasant one.
Well put. Fare well, Mr. Armstrong.
So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of money? -- Ayn Rand