They confed /etc/sudoers so that the perforce user can run everything as root without providing a password. I told them that this is really a bad idea, and they pulled up one of their setup guides with "enhanced security hardening".
It ended up with ~35 specific entries for binaries in sudoers, one of them being /usr/sbin/setcap - which allows you to give e.g. the Python interpreter CAP_SETUID, making a privilege escalation to root trivial again.
Package managers are way more modern than that and their design does by itself not require root (see pip). You can in fact run most package managers without root, you just won't be able to modify system files. You can use them to install a chroot as regular user, e.g. `zypper --installroot ~/tw install bash`.
FUSE doesn't really relate to single vs. multi-user AFAICT.
Users are perfectly sandboxed if you configure the system that way. Depending on the distribution that's even the default.
On succifiently offline systems, you can still run software like that. It's quite freeing to have a server with 777 on your home directory when the biggest problem it'll cause is someone pranking you by altering your terminal color scheme to something hideous.
The authors of Unix have taken most of the concepts of an hierarchical file system from Multics, the main exception being the security features, which have been replaced with the simpler owner-group-all permission bits, together with features like setuid/setgid, which may be OK for simple use cases but which is inadequate for a system with many users, where not all of them can be trusted.
When I was working for a major retailer, who, you'd assume would have thought about these things well enough, you were prevented from executing sudo, except for being able to use it for text editing (sudo vi). I needed to install some packages with a root shell at the time, so I used the command execution feature within vi to get that.
We used to be a real society
I fear that this reference to an old Avis advertising slogan may be lost to a modern audience.
1984 was 40 years ago.
Do organization still apply for these kind of patents?
the engineer gets his name on the patent and maybe a bit of prestige. the org gets another (sometimes bad) patent in the portfolio.
skimming the patent https://patents.google.com/patent/US4135240A/en it seems actually pretty well drafted and pretty good (patentable).
Of course there was nothing else in the UI except this window and the browser, but on ancient Firefox, in the print window you had the option to specify the command line to print. I tried "xterm", hit "Print", and voila, a prompt!
Using ps, I managed to figure out the difference between the unpaid browser and the paid one, and next time around I could launch a browsing session without payment...
We all knew it was a bad idea but when your boss and their boss say do it, it’s done.
I’m pretty sure the dba (autocorrect magically suggested “diva” here) knew as well and just wanted a backdoor to have root for whatever they wanted.
I later busted the same team applying patches out of band with tripwire. Hey, wonder how you pulled that off…
OMG. they applied unapproved patches! to the product they were responsible for making work.
Of course there were no consequences for someone bypassing the approval process and doing unscheduled changes as root. Now, if my team had made those changes without running it past the DBAs...
Ever heard of the principle of least privilege?
They didn’t give me admin in the database and I don’t want it. They aren’t trained in the system and if you’ve ever seen what kind of mess a bunch of amateurs can make of a shared system you wouldn’t sound like such an idiot right now
Ill be sure to tell the auditors that they are gatekeeping dicks for requiring change management on the financial databases
OK, what's the easiest way to get it? option 1: call the IT admin and say "hey bud, can we get these patches and see if it fixes my thing?" or option #2 play some political long game to get sudo vi access via intense political pressure and then hack into the system to install said patches.
if you have to do option #2, then it's the FAULT of the IT system: people follow the path of least resistance. if there was so much hassle having a support organization actually help you such that it was actually easier to do it yourself and fighting (and winning) some political fight with the other dept. to get there, you tell me what's wrong with that support org?
this is why DevOps is an improvement.
you're trying to point at the auditors as being the dicks? nope. any engineer in the company can be equally responsible for configuration management. wanna bet that the IT dept. has no process to allow other engineers to update configuration? or that they won't do it on your behalf in a timely fashion? simply delegate the patch configuration management of the DB to the DBAs and send the auditors to see the experts. there's a good chance they'd take the responsibility seriously and do a better job of it than you.
It’s a good trick to have in your back pocket if you’re given an unprivileged user on a compute node and want to make use of modern tools.
> You can in fact run most package managers without root
It is very clear from the context that dehrmann was talking about Linux distro package managers (Apt, Yum, Dnf, Apk, etc.) and as far as I know they all require root, or at least I have never once seen someone use them without root.
I don't know about that... It doesn't even support multiple administrators. And you can't even distinguish between actions performed by the system itself and the administrative user.
Yes I know about sudo.
What do you need to do and what do the (even audit) logs say about who performed an activity whenever administrative activity happens?
You can easily create multiple accounts that have the uid 0. Groups are a fundamental part of discretionary access system and several administrative groups exist by default. Your modern desktop oriented distribution may not take advantage of these facts.
> logs say about who performed an activity whenever administrative activity happens?
Simply enable process accounting and setup a program to capture that information. The early BSD distributions had this and had many command line tools to query the information it stored.
While perhaps the term "user" is no longer the best, there is a need even more than before to run programs with limited rights, corresponding to the rights of some pseudo-users, which should not be able to access or modify anything belonging to the real human user, unless a special permission is granted.
Nix requires root (at least by default). Brew I'll give you - I didn't know you can use it on Linux. Do people actually do that enough that it works reliably?
Clearly talking about OS level package managers.