Should sudo be used?

[RW]

On Thu, 05 Apr 2007 08:56:28 -0500
Kevin Kinsey <kdk at daleco.biz> wrote:

> Victor Engmark wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > I thought it would be a good idea to use sudo on my FreeBSD laptop,
> > but I'm having doubts after checking the handbook (it's not
> > mentioned at all) and Google (most of the articles were obscure
> > and / or old).
> 
> It's not mentioned in the FreeBSD Handbook because it's not part
> of the FreeBSD "base system". 

Although neither are Gnome, mplayer or growisofs, and they are covered.

> It's a handy tool for calling your own scripts, or running
> unprivileged scripts that need to perform a privileged operation.  I
> believe Christian also mentioned shell aliases; one example from our
> usage is allowing a non-privileged user to establish a PPP
> connection; either a CLI alias or a GUI button aliased to "sudo ppp
> -background myisp".  In my GUI I don't wish to run as root; sudo is
> used so I can be "me" and still have pretty buttons that run
> Ethereal, format a floppy disk, etc.. 


I think you have to be careful about what you are allowing to be done
from general purpose accounts. If you give these authority to install
or upgrade software, you might just as well be using Windows XP. 


BTW ppp can run as any user listed in "allow users" in  ppp.conf.