Ubuntu 7.10 sudoers not working
 

Hi,

Is there an issue with Ubuntu 7.10? I am having problems with the sudoer. After I put in my username, I am still prompted for my password eventhough I already put in "nopasswd". Any help?

I did this on one of my machines - works fine as far as I'm concerned.
What did you setup ???.

How did you edit the sudoers file? Did you use visudo?

I added this line

myusername ALL=(ALL)NOPASSWD:ALL

Anything I'm missing? I am still prompted for my password each time I needed to access administrative commands.

Yes but how did you add it? Did you just edit the sudoers file, or use visudo? visudo is Ubuntu's method for editing sudoers. Just run visudo on the command line. man visudo for details.

EDIT: Where in sudoers did you add this line? If there is a line in sudoers that contradicts another, the latter one is used. For example, if you have Ubuntu's default entry (%admin ALL=(ALL) ALL
) after your own it will override it and everything else above it. Set NOPASSWD for yourself at the end of the file and it should work.

I just used the vi. This works from the previous Ubuntu that I've used 6.06 prior. I will try again later using visudo and let you know. Thanks a lot.

yes, that's right... better use visudo
did you wrote the line like that?
i think you missed to press [TAB] key between word (ALL) and NOPASSWD.
hope this might help..

Be sure to place your entry setting the NOPASSWD option at the end of the file.

Spacing isn't important in sudoers, though if you have many entries, good formatting will make it more readable and allow for more efficient debugging.

And, of course, using nopasswd will open you system for use by any malicious web site you visit.

Why not just set "root" so you can do a su - when you need to mess around at the system level? Giving a normal user unrestricted access to administrative commands is what's known in the trade a "Really Bad Idea". That is, of course, why Microsoft does it by default.

su isn't that good a method for system administration. sudo -s is much better as it preserves much of the environment, including X cookies so one can ececute X applications. And of course sudo doesn't need to be prepended to every command.

Perhaps, but X applications should, I believe, be avoided for most administrative application. For example, using a browser whist holding root privileges is, almost always, an unnecessary hole in your security.

Obviously one shouldn't run something like a browser with root priviledges, but there are plenty of graphical administrative and related applications sometimes requiring to be run with root priviledges, and running those using gksudo can be just as annoying as prepending sudo to every command. Especially if one leaves the computer until the password expires.