Giving sudo privilage to a user

[ebrahimifard]

Background

There are some tasks in Linux that requires superuser (sudo) permission. For instance editing the /etc/fstab file, rebooting the system, mounting a drive, viewing /etc/passwd file and many other tasks cannot be done without sudo privilege.

What this documentation will help achieve

This documentation helps you to give sudo privilege to a user.

Prerequisites

• TU Delft netID
• Basic knowledge of Linux
• Those who grant sudo permission need to have sudo permission themselves.

Tools/Software

• For Windows users, you will need a programming and runtime environment like Cygwin or SSH client like PuTTY in order to access the VPS running Linux.

Steps

1. Getting the username(s) of sudo access candidates
2. Navigating to the sudoers directory
3. Create an access file for each of the candidates
4. Editing the access files

Step 1. Getting the username(s) of sudo access candidates

You can get the usernames by checking the /etc/passwd file. This file contains all the usernames and their login information.

Step 2. Navigating to the sudoers directory

The list of users who posses the sudo permission is in the /etc/sudoers.d/ folder, so navigate to that folder.

Step 3. Create an access file for each of the candidates

If you use ls command to check the available files in this folder, you can see there are some files that their name start with a number and then a dash and then a user name (<number>-<username>). In Linux for every user with a sudo permission, there is a file like that, so we duplicate one of the existing files and rename them for each of the sudo candidates (in fact, name of those file doesn't matter; however, it helps us to understand which users have sudo privilege without opening them).

Step 4. Editing the access files

In this step you need to open each of the newly duplicated files and replace the old username in the second line with the sudo candidate username. After the edit, you just save the changes and exit the file.