“familiarity breeds contempt”
I get very comfortable with using the vim editor (take cover… flame way ensuing) so comfortable that using any other editor leaves me just a bit unnerved. I constantly use it to update sudoers. The best way to modify sudoers is to add a supplimental inclusion file under /etc/sudoers.d/whatevername - so the other day I needed to add an entry to allow the user for my simple monitoring program (xymon) to be able to run “sudo ufw status” without a password and report back to the monitor server.
I fired up
sudo vim /etc/sudoers.d/xymon
and started to add the needed line:
xymon ALL = NOPASSWD: /usr/sbin/ufw status
but I got halfway through and could not remember the exact location
of the ufw binary file.. so I savedi, got out, and I just sawed off the limb I was standing on. Sudo is not totally broken so I had togo to the physical machine (which happened to be a raspberry pi) hook up a monitor and keyboard and fix it by logging in as root and finish editing the sudoers supplemental file correctly. I did it the proper way this time; I used visudo which protects you from yourself.
Lesson: Always use visudo
By the way, to change the default editor from nano to vim for visudo (on unbuntu at least) you can run:
sudo update-alternatives --config editor
On my systems that exchange looks like this:
$ sudo update-alternatives --config editor There are 4 choices for the alternative editor (providing /usr/bin/editor). Selection Path Priority Status ------------------------------------------------------------ * 0 /bin/nano 40 auto mode 1 /bin/ed -100 manual mode 2 /bin/nano 40 manual mode 3 /usr/bin/vim.basic 30 manual mode 4 /usr/bin/vim.tiny 10 manual mode
Press [enter] to keep the current choice(*), or type selection number: 3 update-alternatives: using /usr/bin/vim.basic to provide /usr/bin/editor (editor) in manual mode
Enjoy
-g-
