Common Traits of the Veteran Unix Admin 592
snydeq writes "Deep End's Paul Venezia offers a field guide to understanding your resident Unix veteran, laying out the nine traits common to this grizzled, hardcore set. From not using sudo, to wielding regular expressions like weapons, to generally assuming the problem resides with whomever is asking the question, each trait is key to 'spotting these rare, beautiful creatures in the wild,' Venezia writes. 'If some of these traits seem anti-social or difficult to understand from a lay perspective, that's because they are. Where others may see intractable, overly difficult methods, we see enlightenment, borne from years of learning, experience, and overall, logic.'"
Re:We don't use sudo? (Score:5, Interesting)
Sudo everything provides an actual audit trail to the actions taken by an admin. which is essential in environments where governance and acountability are required.
Provided you don't trust it to actually do those things. If someone can run 'sudo su -' then they own the system and can make the sudo log files say whatever they want, including removing the fact that they ran 'sudo su -'. Ditto 'sudo emacs', 'sudo dd', 'sudo mv' or any other command that as root will execute subsidiary commands, write specified data to specified files or any various other routes to a root shell. And in most cases you don't even need to muck about modifying logs: Just 'sudo emacs /etc/something/innocuous' and nothing untoward appears in the sudo log but you can run unlogged commands from within emacs, etc.
sudo can be useful in situations where you have a very limited subset of commands that a user should be able to execute as root and each will run as root without allowing the user to achieve a root shell. The trouble is that most commands that aren't already setuid aren't especially designed that way, so that scenario doesn't happen very often.
I guess you could say it's useful if you want to have some kind of faith-based auditing mechanism where you assume your sudoers aren't malicious and therefore won't modify the logs or work around the logging. But if you trust your sudoers that much then why do you need to audit them? It smells like a mechanism to provide the appearance of auditing so that someone's PHB can be satisfied that auditing exists, even though you can't really trust the audit log to be complete or correct.