oops category archive

Don’t remove the ‘super’ from sudo, like I did in Ubuntu

There’s a fine line between empowerment and impotence in Unix. Is that why it sounds like eunuchs?

I accidentally revoked my power to run the sudo command. Yeah, it was a dumb thing to do. With godlike power comes great responsibility, and there I was like some half-wit sticking a fork in an electrical outlet. I realize the need to be careful as root in Unix systems, and in the case of Ubuntu when running sudo, but still: oops.

Maybe I was lured to incaution by the rapid typing of commands while trying to get something working, in this case: TrueCrypt. I had set the SUID bit on it with sudo chmod u+s /usr/bin/truecrypt so that a regular user could run the program, but I was concerned about security issues.

I find that in …