SUDO versus SUROOT

[Angie_1]

Hello All,

Question regarding control of the root account. I have found information about SUDO, but wondering if SUROOT is something a thing of the past as I haven't seen any information about it out there. We have it on a 10.20 OS system. Both do the exact same thing though?

Thanks - Angie

[Victor BERRIDGE]

Just to confuse you a bit more look at
http://www.freshports.org/sysutils/su2/

su2 (we use it here) used to use in conjonction with a super-users list to grant root access to authorized people...

I suppose they have all in common the main functionnality and they all add some ways of customizing things....


All the best
Victor

[John Poff]

Hi,

I've never heard of any software called SUROOT. I'd opt for using SUDO instead, as it is widely used and you can get plenty of help with it here.

JP

[Victor BERRIDGE]

I forgot to say my preferences goes also to sudo, su2 will not install itself on trusted boxes...

All the best
Victor

[Angie_1]

Ok I need to correct myself. I found that SUROOT was aliased to SUPER. Any of you use SUPER? Ok and again... do both SUDO and SUPER do the same thing?

Thanks - Angie

[John Poff · Accepted solution]

I found a link to Super on the HP-UX Porting Centre:

http://gatekeep.cs.utah.edu/hppd/hpux/Sysadmin/super-3.9.7/

Here is a snippet from the README:

--------------------
Super and sudo

I have received some enquiries regarding the difference between super
and sudo, another program designed to give restricted access to certain
commands.

Sudo --
Sudo allows a permitted user to execute a command as the superuser.
I think its central design philosophy is that each user can be
trusted when executing certain commands. This is implemented
by allowing each user to execute the restricted commands for
which s/he is trusted, without giving access to other restricted commands.

Super --
The design philosophy behind super is two-fold:
(a) some users can be trusted when executing certain commands;
(b) there are some commands, such as a script to mount CDROM's,
which you'd like to be safely executable even by users who
are NOT trusted. Although setuid-root scripts are insecure,
a good setuid-root wrapper around a sensible non-setuid script
can be hard to break, and super provides that wrapper so that
even a non-trusted user can use the scripts.

In my view, the main differences to the administrator are:

(1) the files that specify valid user/command combinations have
a different look and feel.

(2) super provides a safe wrapper for scripts, so that a
well-written script can be run safely by ordinary
users without having to actually trust them.

-------------------

Since the version of the Super program at the Porting Centre is dated 1997, I'd
still be inclined to go with SUDO.

JP

[Sanjay_6]

Hi Angie,

I've never heard of suroot. It is possible someone might have written a script to wrap sudo using this script.

Sudo is a convenient and free tool to allow users access to root / other user accounts. You can assign full access or limit the access to certain commands.

If you want, you can download sudo from hp porting site, one of those site is listed below,

http://hpux.cs.utah.edu/hppd/hpux/Sysadmin/sudo-1.6.7p5/

Another software is Powerbroker. This is a licensed product that can be purchased from symark, website http://www.symark.com

We use sudo to decentralize root access and powerbroker to centralize root access. If you use powerbroker, you need to do the configuration on powerbroker master in place of individual systems that you do if you use sudo.

On the server where you see suroot, check out the path and see if the file is readable and check and see what program / service it is actually using.

Hope this helps.

Regds

[Angie_1]

Thanks to all of you that replied. I will look more at SUDO.

Thanks Again!!
Angie